


The Haunting of Blymore

by ClomWrites, dark_moonflower, inyourbrain, knopecommaleslie



Category: The Haunting of Bly Manor (TV)
Genre: F/F, Gardener Jamie, Ghost Dani, Ghostfic, Probably more angst, a bit of canon compliance, a smattering of OCs - Freeform, and some romance, big concern Owen, blymore, here come the feels, many canon divergence, ts gifted this, upon this earth, we are but her tools, we got some angst, wine bar au
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-22
Updated: 2021-03-18
Packaged: 2021-03-19 01:59:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 40,785
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29618847
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ClomWrites/pseuds/ClomWrites, https://archiveofourown.org/users/dark_moonflower/pseuds/dark_moonflower, https://archiveofourown.org/users/inyourbrain/pseuds/inyourbrain, https://archiveofourown.org/users/knopecommaleslie/pseuds/knopecommaleslie
Summary: Four authors, one common goal: Produce one epic Bly Manor fic for each of the fifteen songs on Taylor Swift’s evermore album.ORClomWrites, dark_moonflower, inyourbrain, and knopecommaleslie join forces to see what happens when you combine the two gayest things to happen in 2020 together.--Some of these will be angsty (OK, have you HEARD this album, though? Let’s be honest: many will be angsty), some will be fluffy, some will be smutty.Some will be canon, some will be AU. It’s a veritable Bly Cottagecore grab bag!All will make you have FEELINGS!C1: coney island (two-shot part 1) – inyourbrainC2: marjorie (two-shot part 2) – inyourbrainC3: happiness (AU) – knopecommaleslieC4: willow (AU) – ClomWritesC5: cowboy like me (AU) – dark_moonflowerC6: gold rush (AU) – knopecommaleslieC7: dorothea (AU) - dark_moonflower
Relationships: Dani Clayton & Jamie, Dani Clayton/Jamie
Comments: 142
Kudos: 143





	1. coney island

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome to our wildest dreams wherein we've taken it upon ourselves to fill this blank space with gorgeous love stories and epiphanies! Let us lead you out of the woods in our getaway car so you can bask in the afterglow of the story of Dani and Jamie, and all of our favourites. 
> 
> Please enjoy our application of Bly onto Evermore in a series of one and two-shots, AU/Non-AU, long and short. We're packing it all! 
> 
> First up we have part one of a Coney Island inspired post Bly canon two-shot! It's not necessary but I do recommend listening to the tune as you read for some real angsty goodness!
> 
> xoxo  
> inyourbrain

Jamie sits on the boardwalk, breath heavy as her heart. Her knee bounces erratically, as she stares into the kaleidoscope of fun, energy, joy, and freedom screaming at her. Taunting her. Daring her.

Trumpets, trombones, drums, she ticks them off one by one in her head. Isolating and identifying and ignoring the crumbling will within her to move. To find her answers. To bury her pain.

She swallows around the lump in her throat, forcing the ecstatic screams and orchestra of soprano laughter away from her. Desperately boarding up the hole in her chest against it, sneering at the teenagers holding hands and the bounding sprints of the wild and free.

She was once one of them, once their equal in spirit, giggling gaily with her love over the mechanical _whoosh_ of machines and the gaudy sound effects pulling her attention this way and that.

Now, though, she is most decidedly different in the most fundamental ways a person can be. She is halved. Not even a full person. Shattered and torn. The sprinkling giggles and extravagant joy cut around her like a river past a rock, repelled by her broken soul. Will it open and let her in, let her find what she seeks?

It hurts, being on the outside of such jubilation, but it would hurt worse to feel it, she reckons. Feeling joy without her Dani. What a betrayal that would be.

She couldn’t do that to her.

She wouldn’t.

She would carry her pain and her hurt around her for a hundred years before she took a second of happiness without her.

She pulls out a cigarette, her third, and stands. The lighter shakes in her jittery hands.

A small child bumps into her legs, bright pink cotton candy brushing against her worn flannel. A small “Sorry miss!” and the child is gone, but the flannel remains in her focus. She brushes the spun sugar off, fingering it idly.

Dani would be amused. Her eyes would glitter, and her mouth would purse, ticking up just at the corners to tell Jamie that she _knew_ this is the shirt she would choose. She would giggle and clip her sides, tickling her as she ran away and rolled her eyes. She would call her sentimental, and Jamie would deny, parry with a, “It’s _clean,_ fresh out the wash, that’s all I need, alright?” But really, they would both know it’s a lie. Could she have worn anything else?

She closes her eyes, letting the sharp scent of oil and cooked sugar and overpriced hotdogs fill her senses, lets it carry her back to _before_ , allows it to fill her heart with the sweet agony of Dani.

_The smell of the sea air hits her first, and she piques an eyebrow._

_The sea. This is her birthday surprise?_

_She grins and shakes her head. She’d told Dani how much she adored the sea as a child soon after moving here. Soon after their “one day at a time” pact. It made sense._

_One day at a time had turned from a pact of sorrow, of trepidation, into which they could pour their fears and faults, and it had grown. It took on their worries and their cares and swallowed them up, and days and days at a time were given back tenfold. They began to let the ease in, let the excitement permeate their lives. And one day at a time began to morph into one adventure at a time, instead now drawing out their excuses and promises in and leaving them with a “do it now or never” mentality._

_They’d settled, picked up a business and a place. Decorated their lives with vibrance and love. And Jamie had settled into the delicacy of it, solidifying it further each day. Long-haul roots inching further under their feet every day, the most secure thing she’s ever known._

_“Are we going to the seaside?” she guesses._

_Dani giggles and squeezes her hand. She had been insistent from the start that it be a_ complete _surprise._

_Jamie, banned from planning a single stage of the trip, not mode of transport nor acquisition of tickets, had nipped at her for weeks, trying to pry her open for even a small clue._

_She had watched her plan, excitement lighting up her features each time she would playfully decline any kind of snooping, shuffle her papers and hold them close to her chest with a giggle and a desperate, “Get out!”._

_Jamie had only tried Dani’s resolve for the bite of her lip and blush that coloured her cheeks. She wanted to tell her, everything within her wanted to spill the secret, Jamie knew. Each time the question was posed she grew closer to letting her in._

_More smells filled her senses, and the speed with which Dani pulled her along grew. She’s running behind her now, weaving in and out of people. A lot of people. Boisterous instruments, louder and louder, pummel their music into her ears, through her chest._

_Elation bounds off Dani in waves, and Jamie rides each one, every giggling crest and cackling trough._

_“This, Jamie!” she stops, catching her round the middle and tugging the blindfold down to loop around her neck gently._

_“Wh- what’s all this?” she stammers, fighting to keep her sensitive eyes open against the assault of light and colour._

_“This is Coney Island!”_

_“You brought me to a fairground!”_

_“_ **The** _fairground, Jamie. It’s the best!”_

_Jamie shakes her head in wonder, staring up Ferris wheel’s whirling lights, the screaming children surrounding a single stick of cotton candy, the rushing rollercoaster. “Dani,” she laughs, “this is amazing!”_

_“I know, right!” Her smile touches her eyes and Jamie sees the sun, and stars, and her future there._

_And she pulls her hand, tugging her forth into the enveloping ebullience of the fairground._

_“First things first!” Dani says, clutching tightly to her hand and turning to face her. The sun dances in her eyes, a wicked smirk playing on her face. “The food.”_

_“The food!” Jamie laughs._

_“It’s all about the food,” Dani hums, throwing her arms around her neck._

_Jamie leans in, steals a kiss from laughing lips, and looks over her shoulder at the signs bursting with colours proclaiming: ‘World’s Most Famous Hotdog,’ ‘Cold Beer Here,’ ‘Cotton Candy.’ Different popping colours matching their energy stretches over the opposite awning hawking a selection of: ‘Kebab,’ ‘Pizza,’ ‘Popcorn,’ ‘Seafood.’_

_She catches Dani starting out of the corner of her eye, opens her mouth to pick something, anything, but the options are endless, and she ends up only laughing and shaking her head. “Don’t know where to start, if I’m honest.”_

_Dani laughs gleefully, holds her tighter, “It’s great isn’t it!”_

_“Never seen anything more American in my life. Big and loud and teeming with choice.”_

_She bites her lip, and Jamie leans in to claim it once released._

_“Come on, we’ll start with a classic.”_

_“What’s that?”_

_“The hotdog. A staple of fairgrounds and street vendors the country over.”_

_“I’ll only accept the World’s Most Famous hot dog. It is my birthday afte- shite. That’s a fucking queue. Second most famous please?”_

_Hotdogs – generously sauced in mustard and lathered in fried onions, are followed by a slice each – a conservative term for what Jamie estimates to be an entire pizza’s worth of food in one cut – and a liberal scoop of ice cream – opposite flavours to allow Dani’s spoon to combine “the experience”._

_Admittedly, food might not have been the cleverest place to start. Each and every deep-fried morsel to cross her lips had coaxed a deeply satisfied groan, joining an identical one drawn from Dani’s throat, and it forced her concerns she had down._

_And so, by evening time, after their single excursion on the rollercoaster, in which Dani’s face had gone from lit in excitement and trepidation a distinctly greener hue with each inch of their eighty-metre drop, Jamie is holding her hair back as each sugary crumb of deliciousness makes its reappearance._

_“Oh God,” she groans._

_“Gonna be alright, Poppins. All out now, yeah?”_

_Dani nods, wiping the streaming tears from her eyes. “All good.”_

_“Let’s make a move. Get you home.”_

_“What? No! I’m fine. Gimme that.” She grabs Jamie’s water bottle, taking a quick swig and swish, smiling weakly as she pushes Jamie out of the cubicle. “Good as new!”_

_“Dani,” Jamie laughs, inching her way in the direction of the exit. “You’re not well.”_

_“I’m fine, I’m fine, I feel way better. C’mon, it’s your birthday. There’s so much more to do!”_

_“I’ve already had a great day, best birthday present ever, honest.”_

_“Uh uh.” She shakes her head and pulls Jamie further into the park, further into the bright fluorescence glowing against the night sky._

_“You know,” she murmurs beside her, “you’re all I really want for my birthday anyway. Really, if you’re not up for this, it’s alr-”_

_“Jamie,” Dani sighs, “I’m really okay, stop worrying. It’s your birthday.”_

_“Okay,” she grins, “but no more rides. Stick strictly to winning teddy bears, got it?”_

* * *

_“Rubbish!” Jamie complains, failing once again to loop her ring around the exposed bottle tops._

_Dani laughs, nudging her to the side and taking her remaining ring. “Lemme show you how it’s done!”_

_“Oh!” Jamie piques an eyebrow at her, “by all means, Poppins!”_

_Dani sizes up the distance, the pink of her tongue peeping out as she squints her face in concentration._

_Jamie’s heart swells at the sight of her, a lightness bubbling from her stomach._

_Even as her ring crashes into the bottle top, bouncing erratically around the stand and flopping onto the floor, Jamie smiles. She wraps an arm around her shoulders, cooing at her about rigged games and con artists._

_Dani laughs and pulls her along, stopping briefly in front of a large glass encasement. “Hey!”_

_“Yeah?” Jamie asks, coming back to take a look._

_“Fortune teller!”_

_“Ah,” Jamie cringes, “really?”_

_“Could be fun!”_

_Dani’s bright and untroubled smile is the single reason on the planet that Jamie would agree to this, given what they’d left behind. She’d had the fill of her life of creepy shit, thank you very much._

_She looks from Dani’s face, lit brightly by the giant puppet’s luminescent case, to her own hand, already reaching for the coins in her pocket, and feels the grasp of Dani’s excited embrace._

_“You know,” a woman, dark and graceful, steps from behind the glass case and leans lightly on it. “If it’s your fortune you want told, I could tell you much more than Zeldo.” Her long fingernails, elaborately painted, tap the glass._

_“Uh I don’-”_

_“Yeah!” Dani interrupts her, shooting her a pleading look._

_A small, niggling feeling settles into the pit of Jamie’s stomach, but she nods anyway and follows Dani, hanging on tightly to her hand._

_They’re escorted behind the tents, amongst the whizzing machines and pumping tubes, behind the scenes of the carnival, no longer scented with sweet and salty but with oil and labour._

_Dani follows closely, Jamie dragging behind, each step opening the worry in her heart wider._

_The woman disappears behind dusty drapes cut away into a dark tent, and Jamie stops. Dani turns, looks at her questioningly._

_“Dani, I-” she cuts herself off, unsure. This feels off, wrong. Something about it makes her skin crawl and the small hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. But how is she supposed to tell Dani that, when her eyes are searching, pleading with her to do go forward with her._

_“Jamie, please,” she speaks softly, “I think I need this.”_

_Jamie frowns into the darkness, eyes trailing over Dani’s shoulder to settle on the haggard face of large man who grabs hold of the drapes and looks at them pointedly. Muscle for the witch._

_Indecision still wrestles inside of her, but she takes a deep breath and nods, and Dani once again leads them onward. They cross the threshold of the tent into a space illuminated in candlelight and fragranced in with incense._

_“Sit,” the woman commands, already settled across from them._

_Jamie takes her place next to Dani, studying the woman closely. She is beautiful, her features exaggerated with make-up in a way she would never even think to achieve._

_“How does this work?” Dani asks, cutting through Jamie’s assessment, hitting home to the question Jamie is wanting answered herself. She wants to hear that it’s a crystal ball, or a smoking mirror, or some such other nonsense she can disregard, laugh at later. But nothing comes, the woman just smiles softly, bats her heavy eyes secretively, and some of Jamie’s fear turns to irritation at not being allowed this one small reprieve._

_Jamie turns, and studies Dani instead. Her leg is bouncing, and she gnaws a lip between her teeth. Nervous. Nervous but needing. Jamie knows the questions that live within her, wake her up in the night, the ones she refuses to speak aloud. She knows the need to purge them, the need for redemption. Jamie feels it too. The gallows that await Dani wait for her too, their fates interlocked now._

_She wants Dani to have this, more than her need to flee, but her stomach is nauseous at the destruction of these answers._

_“We start with this one,” the woman smiles, nodding to Jamie._

_She no more wants to partake in this than stick her hand into an oven, but when the woman’s outstretched palm calls for her own, she extracted it from Dani’s and surrenders it to the strange woman_ _._

_A pair of dice are placed in her hand, crude symbols carved over the standard dots assigning the value to each face. The woman folds her hand closed._

_“Cast the die,” she breathes, motioning to a giant brass bowl in the middle of the table._

_Jamie frowns, screws up her mouth, readying to claim false. What the fuck could this tell anyone? But she throws the dice anyway; Dani needs this._

_The woman smiles, no doubt counting her blessings to have come across the two most gullible marks in the whole carnival, but her smile freezes on her face as she scrutinises the settling dice in the bowl. Her eyes flicker up to meet Jamie’s briefly before shooting back to the bowl._

_And no matter how much she doesn’t want to believe it, calls the woman false in her head, she can’t shake the dim regret she feels for following her in the first place, not standing her ground. The unease that courses up her spine makes her clench her teeth._

_“What?” she asks, swallowing hard._

_The woman fixes her features, quick as a flash, and smiles. She picks the dice up, hesitating only momentarily before touching them._

_“Now you,” she whispers to Dani._

_Dani places her hands in the woman’s, just as Jamie had, trembling just a little._

_Jamie wants to reach out, rip Dani’s hands back, stop the marked dice before they are enveloped in Dani’s warmth. The gnawing in her stomach tells her to stop this now, not let it happen. They’d had a great day. This strange woman, the warped ritual they’re entwined in, threatening to tear it from their grasp._

_But she doesn’t. She waits. And watches. A car crash she can’t tear her eyes from._

_Dani casts the dice into the bowl as instructed._

_This time they are not met with mere curiosity, but raw fear. The woman’s eyes bulge, and shoot to Dani, hold her for a long moment, before sweeping the dice up into her own hands._

_“Out,” she says, shooing them._

_“What?” Dani asks, “What did you see?”_

_“Leave, now.”_

_“What did you see? Tell me!” Desperation strains her voice, Jamie looks at her, fiercer than she’d been in a long time. Fear wells within her._

_“Get out, now.”_

_“Wait!”_

_“No. Now.”_

_Jamie pulls Dani away, shuffling to the side entrance of the smoky room and the large silhouette that grabs the canvas cover roughly to let them pass. She hauls her out of the tent, along the backs of the amusements, stumbling in the darkness over tent lines and pegs._

_“That was fucking weird.”_

_“Yeah,” Dani replies, soft and distant._

_Jamie curses herself for this, the great day they had being marred by an uncertain future once again. She knows she could have diverted them, insisted on going home. Dani would never have pushed her beyond her limits. She would have been annoyed, sad even maybe. Perhaps a small grudge would colour the rest of their trip. And Jamie would have felt it, can always feel when their vibe is off. Hates it more than anything. But surely that would have been better than this. The reengagement with her trauma is written plain to see all over Dani’s face, and Jamie would give everything she owned to have that energy pumped into a grudge aimed at her own heart instead._

_“Dani,” Jamie sighs, desperate to fix this, “it’s a con. Just a con. She doesn’t know anything real. Casts her nasty, scratched up dice into a bowl and knows the future, does she? Bollocks. Probably someone watching us right now ready to draw us into the next stage of their scheme after she’s softened us up, yeah?”_

_Dani’s smile reaches nowhere near her eyes when she replies a soft, “Yeah, you’re right.”_

How she wishes she had been right. She’d give anything. Her left arm, her soul, her entire life. She would do anything not to feel like her insides are being squeezed and pulled apart at the same time.

Fifteen years it had been since they were here, the intervening years passing largely in blissful peace. They'd revelled in wonderous happiness together, for the most part untouched and untroubled by the plague that would define the last days of their life together. Small niggling peeks here and there of the Lady; the most they had had to worry about in those first few years.

The decline from that unfettered joy to every day looking over her shoulder, watching and waiting, day in, day out, for more of Dani to whisper into the wind, weighed heavily on her. The next incident just around the corner, the wondering if this will be the one she can’t patch up with a pact to survive together, or survive for her.

Even that, the heart-breaking descent of them, coloured along the edges with panic and anxiety, would be preferable to the chronic agony she is stuck in now. Ever-present and all consuming. The kind of pain that makes your friends worry about leaving you alone, and panic if you fail to answer a message.

This is her life now, to be in a constant state of wondering how difficult her next breath will be to take.

And that woman knew it. She had seen something in her dice that had made Jamie’s blood run cold and the soft hairs on the back of her neck stand on end.

She had played it off at the time for a con job, but Dani hadn’t believed her; even when she had tried to convince herself, it had been a weak attempt.

She had revisited the memory many times, spurred on by that haunted look Dani had sometimes gotten lost in, or when her nightmares spilled over into fitful groans and lurching limbs, waking Jamie. She had recalled it, searching it for a tell, anything to show her that it was ludicrous to consider it _real._

But the fact remains: through all these years, that the memory, when poked and prodded, elicits fear. And why would she be scared of something she did not truly believe in?

She flings her cigarette away and walks, unseeing and unfeeling, into the bustling activity before her. She’s waited for the sun to go down to begin the final part of this journey, the night sky making the vibrance of the colours pop, though each and every one of them is lost on Jamie.

She moves ghost-like, flitting in between the vendors and gamers, the stalls and amusements, past the rides and the attractions. Slipping through the world like a spectre. Same dirt under her feet, stars above her head, different plane of existence.

Her motions carry her to the spot, a decidedly dustier Zeldo. He sits in his glass box, paint chipped, and white eyes turned grey, looking through her. He still proclaims to offer insights, now for five dollars instead of one. The price of her future increasing in ways only the truly lifeless could know.

Jamie’s chest is in ribbons, pulling each piece together and knotting it tight.

_Hold it together._

_Nearly there._

She twists her tattered Converse in the dirt, grounding herself. Bounces on her toes, willing the energy of the living into her bones, and surges forward.

She walks with single focus onto the trampled grass, evades jutting pegs and winds through a maze of lines and wires.

Her stomach swoops with each passing tent, each set of eyes that follow. No one stops her.

The moonlight guides her way, shows her path clearly, lights up to the same tent, same dusty drapes.

She doesn’t pause this time before pushing her way through, meets the woman’s eye calmly, a million questions refusing to leave her tongue.

The woman is as beautiful as before, dark features and heavy eyes. She might not have aged a single day, and had Jamie been in any way able to attend to anything but the ache in her heart, she might have taken note.

The motion to sit is obeyed immediately, hands held out for her own. Jamie obliges, new questions forming over the old ones that crave answer.

The dice are cold in her hands, they suck the warmth from her fingers.

They fall like dead weight into the bowl, carrying more than their lot.

The dig and rattle as they settle reverberate around Jamie’s brain, pleading for resolution.

Warm hands enclose on her own, a sad smile and a soft word.

“I am sorry.”

Tears leak from her eyes, tracing scalding warmth down her cold face. “You knew? You could see?”

A sigh. “Yes.”

“If you’d _told_ us, I– coul–”

“No. Nothing you could have done. Something far darker than anything you could fight lurked beneath. There was no hope. Better you not know.”

A tight sob stole her breath.

The hands tighten. “I am sorry. She was a strong woman, but this was always her end.”

“So, she’s gone then,” Jamie asks, muscles seizing under the weight of the world crumbling.

“Of course not.”

“What?” Jamie sniffs.

Her smile widens in kindness. “Of course she is not gone.”

* * *

She turns on the taps, plugs the sink and the bath. The water is clear, and when the ripples ease it’s only herself staring back and the soft undulating from each tear that hits it.

Nothing but Jamie.

But maybe someday.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you made it through, I do appreciate the attention! 
> 
> Part Two of this two shot will be with us in a couple of days! 
> 
> Any feedback is, as always, greatly appreciated! 
> 
> iyb


	2. marjorie

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The second part of our first two-shot inspired by marjorie! 
> 
> Once again, I high rec listening to the song as you go, but not strictly necessary (I know you Swifties will)!

**One Year Anniversary**

A medicated sleep digs its claws into Jamie; an assisted reprieve from her empty bed and quiet, endless night.

Sometimes she is spared from her agony bleeding into her dreams, gifted with sweet oblivion.

And sometimes, like now, the nightmares chase her. They force their way in, claiming the last pieces of her.

It’s the same, it’s always the same. The pondweed weaves around her legs, keeping her submerged in her own cold, silent lake. They pull and she sinks, daylight growing fainter, darkness enveloping her.

She struggles against this, most of the time, fighting to live and make it out of her crippling sorrow as the pressure in her chest erupts into strangled gasps and inescapable sobs. She wants to be better.

But occasionally she doesn’t. She lets it pull her down, further into its depths, because really what’s the point anyway? She wants to be dragged asunder, wills it to give her Dani’s end. These ones leave her dead to the world. No wakeful screaming or tearing through oxygen. Just the peace of conceding her soul to the cosmos.

It takes seven rings for the rhythmic judder of her phone’s thrumming against the nightstand to seep into her consciousness and shatter her dark fantasy.

She hates it. Had only accepted the gift of _joining the twenty-first century, Jamie_ for the concern that outweighed the humour in Owen’s eye. Regardless of her surety of being in the minority of this particular facet of the twenty-first century, she had melted into a grudging acquiescence, the energy to fight it having long since fled her bones.

She groans, swings out an arm, and sharply shoves the device from the surface and into the pile of unwashed clothes bunched on the floor. 

No further vibrations disturb her, the fabric sufficiently absorbing whatever concern lies for her on the other end. But the guilt does. She knows the pain of caring for those disengaged with their own future. 

Even as the guilt holds her heart hostage, an anger simmers beneath it. Can he not give her _this one Goddamn day for fuck's sake!_ She'd sleep to the end of time to avoid this day. 

She might’ve hurled the phone into the sea with the amount of her unsolicited attention it had sucked up this past year. Only kept its place on her nightstand this long out of her polite responsibility for his fear.

Every scrap of happiness had been sheared from her soul, no need to infect Owen with her despair. God knows he’s had enough of his own.

Always asking after her, afraid to leave her alone, afraid her life will implode in the one evening they don’t speak, or afternoon, or night. Scared he’ll be left to pick up the pieces just as she was.

She can’t do that to him, not again. Afterall, he’s probably right. She could see that being the case if not for the fundamental parts of her, built through a hard childhood and tougher adolescence, urging survival, forcing her not to burden anyone else.

Still, it’s not enough today. She’ll accept the guilt of encumbering him with his own loaded imagination. She could save him from it, but instead, she turns over in bed, finishes out the last lingering dregs of her groggy sleep.

* * *

Eventually, with the noon sun pawing at her eyelids, she rises. The haze in her head pumps blood mercilessly against her temples and she sits and massages them, reaching for the glass of water for the relief she knows will be forever withheld from her.

The pile of clothes still ensconces her phone. It stares up at her, mocking her, tiny screen lighting ominously with the next call pulling at the attention she desperately only wants to bestow on the one person who can’t receive it.

She sighs, throws the damn thing from the soft plaid Dani had often pilfered from the freshly laundered pile before it could ever meet their closet, and wraps it around herself.

It had probably been worn a hundred times more by her than Jamie herself, excluding this past year from the tally.

The warm cotton envelops her, and she breathes in, imagining for a moment she can smell the soft perfume long since washed out.

Jamie had bled the bottle dry, spraying as often as she walked by it for her fix. She had kept exactly as she’d last left it on her nightstand, to infuse the fabric, to keep the last of her love close, and wailed violently the night the last of it was absorbed.

It had been her most recent descent into despair, crumpled and clutching the bottle for hours. She’d placed it back perfectly, preciously, before collapsing in on herself once more.

It had been a week. One week before the anniversary. And still, pieces are being taken from her, one by one.

_Not this time._

She grits her teeth together, staring a hole through the empty bottle.

_Not this fucking time._

An urge stronger than she’d felt to get moving since the funeral seizes her. Determination to keep this thing, this _one thing_ of Dani’s rockets through her.

Dismissively, she glances at her phone perched precariously on the edge of her bed and sees twelve messages and three missed calls.

She sighs, more guilt. More anger. Owen more than anyone should know what it's like, what she’s going through, _should_ know that she needs this small day of peace.

But then again, he doesn’t really know at all, already twenty years past his own loss.

Everyone thinks their love is _the_ _most_ special, that nothing in the world could possibly compare. She is sure the fallacy of that is what Owen is trying to get through to her. And this is what she revolts against.

His was special, and hers was special, in equal measure. But there’s a pain in wrapping your entire life, entire future around another person, and having them ripped away that he understands too little to be of much help right now.

She doesn’t want to be understood. She doesn’t want him to know how she’s feeling and sympathise and empathise and have food delivered in the evening, and a daily to weekly phone call checking on her.

There’s nothing he can give her.

She doesn’t want anything anyone can give her.

She _wants_ to wallow in her pain, collecting the pieces of Dani that she can. Putting them together and keeping them safe and real for her, locking them away from the world. Their apartment has stayed the same, the polite and pointed suggestions from Owen to initiate a clear out going completely ignored. She had frozen it in time, a shrine to their love: the last glass Dani had cracked still sat in the corner of the counter, the fair-ground stubs tucked away in the memento-frame she had hand crafted, their plant forever under her caring eye in prime position on the table.

Jamie can’t afford to lose a single portion of it.

Not a single piece of her shredded soul will allow Owen to convince her to start letting that go.

So, she keys back a text without reading any of his.

_“All good. Talk later.”_

She ignores the phone when it immediately starts ringing. 

She’s already shoved her legs into sweatpants, feet into boots, keys in hand and is out the door.

Fuck the phone, she could do with a day away from it.

The car ride to the store passes in a haze she can’t for the life of her recall when the car stops. Not a single moment imbeds in her memory, not a tree or a person she’d passed, not the sun shining in her eyes or the other cars on the road.

She pays it no attention, is fully aware of herself when she hops down from the classically elevated seat she’d once joked with Dani about ( _“Americans! Always have to be the biggest and tallest dog on the road!”_ ), and that’s enough for what she wants to do. The surge of energy still rippling through her, pushing her on.

She walks into the store, hands fisted at her side and jaw clenched. Raw determination sets her skin alight, lifts the ever-present fatigue from her eyes.

She marches up to the counter, points without a word.

The attendant nods, smiles widely, waxes lyrical about the wonderful choice, the complimentary fragrances and how such a rare find it truly is, but several glances at her unsmiling face, the quick analysis of what she knows are dark eyes and pale skin staring back at him, unkempt bed hair and a crumpled shirt, and he stops.

_Thank fuck._

Her head is still pounding from the sedatives, mind returning to its usual fatigued state now her goal is in sight. All she wants is this tiny fucking piece of her Dani, to go home and get back into bed. She could do without all this fucking chatter.

She nods tightly, closing her hand around the card she'd had him charge, and ignores his quizzical look as she accepts their two largest bottles of her salvation, ripped from his hands as though he were taunting a hungry tiger with a slab of meat.

Despondently, as she quickly leaves the store, she registers no joy to having secured her prize, nothing even close to joy. Honestly, she's not sure she remembers what joy is. She registers relief, so sweet and light she nearly starts crying as she clutches the bottles to her chest, squeezing them with an intensity she wishes could have been her last goodbye, and it’s the easiest thing she’s felt in a year.

She climbs back into the seat of her truck, and in a blink is back on the road on the way home. 

The mechanics of the drive are lost on her. First gear, second gear, signal, third, fourth, highway. When did that happen? 

All she can think about is getting the scent of Dani stuck to her skin, feels the rare bubble of excitement in her grail's completion. The signs fly past, buildings she recognises but doesn’t register, forgets them once they’ve gone. 

She makes a mental note not to throw Dani's own smaller bottle out. She'll hide it away and keep it forever. Trees flit past her vision, rocketing past her focus and forgotten in an instant.

A small corner of pure white catches her eye from the passenger carpet, and how she’s never noticed it before she can’t quite explain, but once she does, she's drawn in wholly. It's the signature, just the last four letters but she'd know them anywhere. The sharp descent and ascent of the looping y strikes her soul.

Her heart seizes and she grabs wildly, sliding it out from the slit in the panel.

A receipt, a charge for groceries a few weeks before she had passed.

Jamie balances the steering wheel on her forearms and rubs the receipt between her fingers.

The full signature is there, the fullness of her Dani and one more piece to add to her collection of leftovers from a life spent beside her.

_Danielle Clayton_

For the first time in months she feels something deeper than nothing and grief, and the tears bubble to her eyes and spill onto her cheeks, the searing pain tearing afresh the hole she’d medicated shut.

But this pain is not just pain, it's coloured with another relief. A gift. Her name, written in her hand. A sign she was here and real. And it overwhelms her entirely. 

Wracking sobs wrench themselves from her, heavy and unrelenting. Her breath is fast and unfulfilling, not enough oxygen in the entire world to revitalise her spent energies. She is _so tired._

She can’t see, and she can’t breathe, and she can’t feel anything to make her even want to figure out how to.

The blasting horn of an eighteen-wheeler can’t even shake her out of her wretched state. Adrenaline spikes through her, but she pays this no more heed than she had the trees or the signs, or her phone and Owen on the other end. In the split second she knows it will take she gives into the freeness, the levity from sadness and guilt, and agony. 

She allows it to sink out of focus as Dani’s laughing, smiling face comes to mind when she agrees, _“yep! Biggest, fastest, tallest, strongest dog on the road!”_ from years previous.

She closes her eyes, braces for the impact, sure to find only relief in it, but the steering wheel jerks, righting her on the road and a voice that chills her to her core whispers sharply in her ear, “ _not yet!”_

She pulls in at the side of the road, electric shock radiating from her heart, breathing heavily.

"Dani?"

* * *

**Five Year Anniversary**

“Owen,” she sighs irritably into the phone, slamming the trunk of the car closed on her luggage. “I’m fine.”

“Just checking in, love.”

“I know, I know,” she says, exhaling and forcing her eyes closed against the overwhelming aggravation of it all.

Five years and he’s still calling to make sure she’s not falling to a vice, drinking too much, or eating not enough. Keeping a constant finger on the pulse of her pain.

She couldn’t tell him that, yes, it hurts just as much as it did that first day. Perhaps more now that her memory on this Earth was fading. How many people even remembered the quirk of her lip in a smile now? Or the ring of her dorky laugh. Probably only Jamie. A torch she would carry to the end of her days. 

It angers her to an extent she can’t justify, that people can forget the force of life of Dani Clayton.

Her kindness, selflessness, bravery. Fading like the setting sun, and soon there won’t be any Dani left. No memory of the sweetest laugh or the brightest joy (or the saddest crinkle of her eyebrows when Jamie unjustly steals her last cookie).

All of these precious tiny things whispering away like ash in the wind.

And it’s not fair.

Owen, to his credit, is looking out for the living, pulling Jamie back from a life half in the grave.

He doesn’t understand, Flora had told him once but he’s not the type to _get it._

_Dead doesn’t mean gone._

She had told him about the truck, and he’d explained it off to exhaustion, hallucinations, stress, medication.

It struck her dead, that. For her hope, her respite from torment, to be chalked up to crazy. So she doesn’t tell him anymore, that really to her just because Dani had died doesn’t mean she’s gone.

Instead, she accepts his love and his care with grace, and she pushes her visceral reactions to it down. It would be an unkindness to let him know just how angry it made her for him to urge her to accept the enviable.

She would not join him on the other side of lost love, however happier he seems for it.

She would not give Dani up.

If it meant being part of the living dead, that’s what she would do.

“Why don’t you pop over to Paris this summer? Spend a week getting _Eiffel_ -ly drunk with your old pal?”

Unbidden, a chuckle forces itself from her throat, and she shakes her head despite herself. “Sounds good to me, Owen. Listen I’m about to hit the road, haven’t forked out for the hands free yet so…”

“Say no more, shoot me a text when you get there safe, okay.”

“Sure.” She rolls her eyes and hangs up, chucking the phone into the passenger seat as she makes her getaway.

* * *

The cabin is set in a wooded patch on the outskirts of a small town, her own perfect retreat.

This has been her saving grace the past three years, away from the apartment, the shop, the city. Away from people and expectations.

She texts Owen a simple _safe_ once she’s there and locks her phone in the trunk of her car when she retrieves her bag.

A _silent_ retreat.

It had been four years since she’d felt Dani, since the car had forced itself right and the murmur of her love last graced her ears. And maybe it didn’t make any sense, to leave the place where her things still linger, but the solace of being so far away from everyone made Jamie feel closer to her than she had anywhere else. Less distractions, she supposed.

The end of the summer season a few weeks back afforded her a privacy that would have been trampled by a wood full of campers, fishermen, and adventurists. But now, with the chill back in the air and Halloween looming, the wood was peaceful.

She drops her bags into the hallway, eager and ready to let the nature take her in, make her its own.

Taking in great lungfuls of forest air, she sets forth into its depths, walking the well-worn tracks through its looming canopy, and smiles. Few places in her life give her this kind of liberation.

The shadows are cut through by thin streams of daylight, glittering over the residue of life, of nature and beauty, promising a rebirth and peace that Jamie craves more than anything.

_Take me in, set me free._

She walks slowly, with every step letting the anger, resentment, toxicity that has been permeating her every waking moment for years bleed away.

The familiar ledge is covered in sunlight, waiting for her. She strips off her clothes, places a small rock on top to keep them from blowing in the wind, or the wildlife making off with them, and dives with reckless abandon into the lake.

Cold water freezes her breath in her lungs, washes her worries away, and she breaks the surface with a laugh. Let the icy sensation replace her hurt, her fury. Soothe her soul like a balm.

She wonders sometimes, if Dani had felt the cold. If it had been peaceful, if the water had leached away _her_ pain. If it could leach Jamie’s too.

Because even as she floats, as the icy water turns her limbs numb and her teeth chatter, and the soothing cold begins to hurt, she can feel her tortured soul singing to life once more. The deep wound within her that never goes away, no matter what she does.

She doesn't like to think of Dani's last moments, prefers to remember her like she would want to be remembered. Happy, carefree. Beautiful and young. But the darker thoughts do come. They strike her without permission, refuse to leave, and she hopes the answer to her question is yes, that she at least found a peace there that Jamie could no longer give her; the water had wiped her slate clean of pain.

Jamie floats, eyes closed and ears covered, listening only to the lapping water and mild current, content in her course until, too quickly to be noticed, the water churns around her ankle pulls her down in a rip and she’s holding her breath against it, kicking wildly. Her hounding nightmare coming to fruition. 

And just as suddenly as it had begun, it's over. She is repelled, impossibly, away from the current, forcing her to the surface and _“not yet!”_ rings in her ears once more.

She splutters and coughs, swimming wildly for the shore. 

“Dani,” she sobs on the bank, shaking not at all from the cold.

She’s sure this time, as sure as last time.

* * *

**Thirty Year Anniversary**

It’s twenty-five years before she hears her again. She's sought it for many years, but her Dani could never be rushed. Not in life or death it seems. 

Jamie walks gingerly, hips stiff and knees stiffer. A lifetime of bending and caring and lifting and moving faster than she had any right to be still doing at her advancing age wearing her joints thin. 

She will not slow down. Cannot. To slow down, become idle, is to let the demons take over. Once they’d entered, they’d never left, and it had taken time, but Jamie has made room for them in her life. A comfortable rhythm with her loss.

She’s at peace now with her lot. Grateful for the time she got to have with her love. Happy in a way that fills her more with each passing day.

It’s easier now than it has ever been to wake up in the mornings, the promise of soft breaths only she can feel, the shiver of goosebumps on her skin when the light touches she can’t explain wrap around her hands, her arm, her waist.

Never words, never forceful shoves or imposing will. Simple and gentle. It can be anything these days.

The breeze over her forehead, wiping grey curls from her eyes as she’s falling asleep.

The steadying of her hands as they wrap around her hot tea in the morning.

The soothing pressure on her back as she stands up from watering her favourite fern.

Companionship.

Jamie knows very well if she’d shared her thoughts with anyone they’d cock their head, look sadly back at her, pat her hand and agree with their words, all the while worrying over her declining senses. Sympathy hidden in their eyes.

So, she simply doesn’t tell. She doesn’t need to. Doesn’t care to.

They would think it’s all in her head, but why shouldn’t it be. Dani is alive in her head, and that’s the only place she needs to be.

Jamie knows dead doesn’t mean gone, doesn’t need to. Her heart is filled with more love in these gentle touches these days than she’s felt in years.

Like a promise.

She asks Flora to drive her to the orchard, one she and Dani would wander around in their youth, picking apples, wondering at the glory of nature’s gifts.

Jamie had told her she’d always wanted a tree, Dani had replied that she had had one growing up, would tie a swing to it and her dad would push her for hours. And Jamie’s heart had broken at the love in her voice. She had vowed then to come back here as much as they could, take as many hours as the sun would grant them in the peace.

She walks now in the autumn chill, under the amber skies of her life, through their orchard.

Flora follows a ways behind, carrying the cardigan she had refused getting out of the car. Jamie is grateful for the space Flora knows she needs.

A breeze sprinkles zipping sparks through her, and she looks to the figure walking beside her, smiling harder and happier than she can remember.

“I knew you’d come,” she mumbles, still walking, still taking in her golden apples like perfect baubles on a Christmas tree.

“Never left.”

Jamie smiles, nods, accepts her outstretched hand, perfect and unblemished with her own wrinkled and worked.

Her knees hit the soft earth, the hand not held by Dani sinks into the damp ground.

She feels none of it. Hears none of it. Not the soft thud of her body being taken back by nature, or the soft call of Flora as she races up to her.

The only thing she sees, feels, needs is Dani. Hand in her own, walking her home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! As always, feedback most welcome! 
> 
> iyb  
> xoxo


	3. happiness

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This AU tale, set to evermore's gut-wrenching track 7, happiness, grew out of a curiosity about what Dani would be like if her defining breakup weren’t with Eddie, and if - GASP - Jamie wasn't her first girlfriend? 
> 
> Hope y'all enjoy this rollercoaster of a plane ride! 
> 
> xo,  
> Knope

Half of her can’t believe she’d let Morgan bring her to the airport – she should’ve gotten a cab. Half of her can’t believe she’d let Morgan park and walk her inside – one last time, she’d said, and Dani had sobbed in the parking deck, thinking about how they’d never done at-the-curb pickups and drop-offs, choosing instead to walk the other all the way in or, better, because it meant her girlfriend was arriving instead of departing, made sure to be waiting eagerly at the foot of the escalator every time the other came for a visit.

All of her can’t believe that Morgan had had the gall to kiss her goodbye, and worse, _worse_ , that she’d leaned into it hungrily, _one last one, just one more, I’ll take it_. She still tasted the kiss – salt from her own tears and Morgan’s together, the coffee on Morgan’s tongue from their dreary last breakfast together, the departure day trip to the pancake house yet another ritual preserved even while the whole damn building was burning to the ground.

And absolutely no part of her, in any world, wanted to believe that she’d spent last night curled around, under, and on top of Morgan, in every way she could think of, for the last time she’d ever be able to. And absolutely no part of her ever wanted to forget a single second of any of it.

Because the thing is, she thinks, even as she’s sniveling in the security line, drawing sympathetic glances from old women and disgusted looks from too-cool teens, she’d been happy. She’d found happiness in Morgan when little else in her life made sense: she was fresh out of the closet without a clue how to take the next step, fresh out of college without a job or a plan, and fresh out of a stale and suffocating relationship with her childhood best friend. Morgan had been a safe landing place, and quickly became more than that, became _home_ for Dani, the place where she’d grown and changed into the person she was today.

There had been bumps – there always are, it’s healthy, Dani thinks, as she intentionally calms her breathing and orders a coffee at the Starbucks kiosk. None of them had seemed insurmountable, even when Morgan had landed her dream job in Portland just as Dani was being promoted to lead teacher. They’d planned to weather the separation, had doggedly booked plane tickets every couple of months, kept regular Skype dates and a healthy regimen of sexting. There was even a potential end date in sight: Morgan’s company was floating around the option for people in her position to work remotely, and Dani had nearly fainted in relief at the news.

That Morgan looked less than thrilled; that she had immediately brought up the yoga class she’d fallen in love with and how great it was that she could walk or bike anywhere from her apartment; Dani had carefully overlooked those things, had instead marked her planner calendar with the date of Morgan’s next review, the time at which she’d be able to bring up the change, with hopeful hearts and shamrocks for luck.

She’d been happy, and thought Morgan had too, right up until 8 PM two days prior, when Morgan had sat opposite her in the living room that had never been _theirs_ and told her that she was, in fact, not happy. That she wasn’t happy and didn’t want to try anymore. That she had started to wonder whether Dani was truly happy (she was, she was sure of it) and whether both of them would be happier with other people. For being the saddest day of her life, Dani thinks, she’d sure had to hear the word happiness a lot.

“Happiness isn’t everything,” she’d spluttered, but before she could finish the thought with words like “loyalty, connection, commitment,” Morgan had laughed in her face. “Of course it is! Nothing’s worth doing if it doesn’t make you happy.”

And so then Dani had tried to explain that she was happy, and here’s the evidence – laying out all the pieces of her life that she loved, that she worked hard to share with Morgan from two thousand miles and two time zones away. Morgan had just shaken her head, and after several hours of increasing desperation, Dani had given up, had let Morgan hold her as she collapsed into tears and convulsions and dry heaves and finally, into a restless, hollow sleep on the couch.

Part of her had toyed with changing her flight, had looked up the cost of it, but it was exorbitant, and she’d ultimately taken Morgan up on her offer to spend the last day of her trip “figuring things out between them,” which apparently meant long hours of processing what their lives might look like separately, talking about how to tell their friends and when, and a hefty dose of reminiscing over their time together. (More than once, Dani had fought the urge to ask her if she were sure, if she could really look at all this and say, no, that’s not enough. She’d lost this fight a few times, and each time Morgan had had to say, _Yes, I’m sure. Yes, I’m done_ , it had become more real, a solid shape emerging out of murky waters to show its ugly detail, yet she couldn’t look away, wanted to lean in closer, in fact, understand what and why was happening.) 

The hammer had dropped yesterday afternoon.

Dani replays it in her mind as she sits huddled around herself in the waiting area for her flight, shaky hands holding tight around her coffee like she needs the heat to survive some phantom tundra cold. She and Morgan were taking a walk through the neighborhood, as they often did on these visits, bought coffees just like this one at the corner café and drank them in the park, watching the kids and the dogs, each trying to keep the conversation alive but not too intense – surface things had seemed best, most feasible at that point, Dani feeling like a washcloth used and wrung out.

She’d asked Morgan a completely innocuous question about her work – are those aggressive geese still nesting on the pond at the office? And Morgan had smiled and laughed, and Dani had prepared for a story about how the wretched things had attacked some innocent passerby again, reviving an old joke they’d had since the innocent passerby had been Dani, nearly mauled on her first visit to Morgan’s office the previous year. And yet. Morgan had not talked about the geese at all, but instead had launched into a story about someone she worked with called Ashley, who had been keeping tabs on the geese too, had given them names, had made up backstories. Dani had smiled and laughed along even as her ears quirked at the name. When Morgan finished the story, she said, carefully, “Ashley? Is that the same Ashley who you go running with?”

The noncommittal “Mmmhmmm” got her a quarter of the way there, sparked a glaring lightbulb that she couldn’t believe hadn’t illuminated before.

“Is that…That’s not…Ash?” Morgan had just stared at her, solemn, as if willing Dani to stop. “Is that the same Ash who you went camping with?”

Morgan’s eyes had been enough to tell Dani everything she needed to know. Almost everything. In an instant she was seething. “How. Many. Times?”

“None!” Morgan had shouted, throwing her hands up so fast she almost tossed her coffee cup with them.

“Really,” Dani had said, the venom in her voice fighting with a quaver in her lip. “Because it sounds like you’ve been spending a lot of time together, Morgan.”

Dani’s flight is boarding at last – the first of two she’ll take today, goddammit, no direct flights available spring break week. She barely registers standing up, tugging her carry-on into line when her group is called. She’s focused on what’s happening inside her.

Her stomach churns now as it did then, remembering how Morgan, new to the outdoorsy lifestyle of the Pacific Northwest, had been so excited to find someone willing to teach her how to camp, willing, in fact, to spend a four-day weekend with her – and it had turned out to be _just_ her, when another friend had bailed last minute – backpacking through misty evergreen forest. They had, according to Morgan, had an amazing time, and Dani could see why – even the iPhone pictures of the rocky shoreline vistas she’d received were enough to take her breath away. Morgan had also raved about Ash, said they’d had a real _connection_. A wave of nausea rolls over Dani.

“Really. Listen, Danikins – ” They’d both winced when her pet name had slipped out amidst this of all conversations. “Nothing’s happened between us. I’ve never – _would_ never.” Dani had scoffed. _Everything_ happening to her in that moment had been utterly unimaginable, the very foundation of her world was crumbling. She hadn’t been sure she’d believed Morgan; isn’t one hundred percent sure now. “I’m not leaving you for Ash. But, I’m telling you that….well, that Ashleys exist. For me, and I’d bet for you too. There’s just so much more…happiness available. For both of us.”

She’d tried to take Dani’s hands then, and Dani had pulled them away. She’d been making progress, she had thought, on accepting this, or at least on numbly letting it wash over her, but in that moment had been rocketed right back into disbelief and despair.

Which is where she finds herself again, now, settled in against the window of the fourteenth row. She realizes belatedly that she’s crying again; her cheeks are wet and cold. She knows she can’t go the whole day like this – eyes too full of the past two days on an endless loop to even notice where she’s going. She’s hearing her own voice in her head, too: she’s still talking to Morgan in there, and she wants to throw up, wants to call her, wants to run off this plane and back to Morgan’s apartment and beg her to take her back.

What she does instead, as the plane is lifting up and she’s leaving Portland for what she hopes to God is the last time in her life, is pull a pen and a worn leather book out of her bag – her day planner, which she never leaves home without, even for a “vacation” like this disaster should’ve been. She shakes her head in disgust. She’d packed for several days in bed, nice dinners out, a hike outside the city; she’d gotten several awkward days with Morgan too quiet and too talkative in turns, an eternity of tears to the point of dry heaves, and half-hearted pity-driven trips to their – well, Morgan’s – favorite neighborhood spots. 

She flips to the blank section in the back, usually used for grocery lists and notes on her latest book club selection. She thinks she’ll write a letter to Morgan, one she’s sure she’ll never send, but she needs to purge the words badgering her brain, lest they make her as crazy as she must look to the people around her right now. 

She takes a shaky but deep breath, bends low over the page, and scrawls out not a coherent letter at all but a series of thoughts and phrases that have been twisting through her head all night and morning:

> _I feel completely unmoored knowing that you’re not mine, I’m not yours, we’re nothing to each other anymore._
> 
> _I can’t believe that all the good we had together still wasn’t enough for you. Because it would have been enough for me. I was ready to love you for the rest of my life._
> 
> _All those years. All those secrets and special days and all that fucking time. I gave you the best I had._
> 
> _I hope you really are happy with this. I hope Ash is good for you. I hope she puts up with all your indecisiveness and the way you sneer at things you don’t like, even if she does._
> 
> _I didn’t mean that. Not really. One day I’ll probably even forgive you for this._
> 
> _Have fun finding what you really want._
> 
> _I will, too._

Having sufficiently dumped her head onto the page, she shuts the planner, puts it away, and, now exhausted from the lack of sleep and the emotional maelstrom, slumps against the window and into a heavy sleep for the rest of the flight.

-

She’s got an hour-long layover in Denver, which she’s decided over the past eighteen months of relationship-driven commuting is the perfect amount of time to hit the bathroom, grab food, and be at the gate well in time to board but not so early as to have to wait.

Standing in the food court, she considers her options, and her eyes fall on the sushi place in the corner booth. Morgan hates sushi, so for the sake of convenience when choosing dinner, Dani had stopped having it when they’d moved in together. Come to think of it, she’s not gotten it since Morgan moved, either, just out of habit, and in this moment that strikes her as ridiculous. Well, now there’s certainly nothing to hold her back, she thinks, and strides over to make her selection.

She then opts for another huge coffee, splurges on a mocha since there’s no one around to chide her for too much caffeine, too much sugar. As an afterthought, she piles two bags of overpriced organic gummy bears onto the counter as well. She’s aware she’s being petty, a bit childish, that Morgan won’t ever _know_ she’s effectively staging a rebellion via junk food, but it’s not about Morgan. It’s about Dani and who she’s going to be now that she’s _just_ Dani, no one looking over her shoulder, no one with any expectations as to what she’ll do or how she’ll act.

This sets her thinking about how she can get rid of all the modern décor and pretentious-looking gold-framed art Morgan had chosen for their apartment back when it was shared – Morgan has already told her she won’t be coming back for it; do what you will. As she takes up a position near the gate (pleased to see her timing is impeccable, they’re just now boarding first class), she’s daydreaming about how she’ll hit up all the good thrift shops around town this week, replace it with the vintage mismatched styles she genuinely likes.

Her flight from Denver on to Davenport is on a smaller plane, as people aren’t exactly clamoring to head to eastern Iowa. Dani actually prefers this setup: there are only two seats per side, so everyone gets an aisle or a window, and more often than not, she gets the row to herself.

Her face falls in disappointment as she realizes that won’t be the case today: there’s already someone in seat 21A. _Figures_ , Dani thinks, and keeps shuffling. At least it’s a woman, and not some man who’s going to call her sweetheart and bombard her with personal questions while spreading out across the armrest.

As she reaches her row and stows her carry-on, she takes her seatmate in more fully. The woman looks to be about her age, slighter than her in build, with auburn curls working their way out of a bandana tied as a headband. Dani notices herself _noticing_ the woman’s full lips, an alluring contrast to her otherwise delicate features.

Dani would give this revelation – that she’s already noticing another woman, that she is in fact _allowed_ to notice another woman now that she’s, well, single – more attention, except that the woman also looks like she’s having a panic attack. Her eyes are glazed, staring into middle distance, her shoulders are up at her ears, and she has her hands pulled inside the sleeves of an oversized red-and-black flannel, is wringing the fabric into knots in her lap. As she settles into the aisle seat, Dani can hear the woman muttering something under her breath through clenched teeth – _fuck fuck fuck fuck_ , only it sounds like _fook fook fook fook_.

“Shitty days must be going around, if you’re having one too,” she offers, testing the waters to see if this particular stranger wants to talk or to be left to her own bubble of misery, as Dani herself had wanted just an hour prior.

Dani knows it’s the former as soon as the woman turns to face her, looks at her like she’s a lifeboat in a storm, says, “Ah. Do you _also_ hate flying in tin can death traps?”

“Nah, had a breakup,” Dani says, laughing at herself for the casual way she says it, like she hasn’t been crying for a hundred hours straight. “Flying’s no problem, do it all the time.”

“Oh, shit, I’m sorry.” Dani’s disclosure, however flippant, seems to have shaken the woman out of her own head – not a bad thing at all when you’re terrified of flying and trapped on a plane that’s starting to taxi for takeoff. “He’s an idiot, tell you that,” she nods her head at Dani in an appreciative onceover way that makes Dani’s stomach flip.

“ _She’s_ an idiot,” Dani corrects softly even as she’s smiling at the compliment. “My ex…my ex- _girlfriend_. Is an idiot.”

“Oh, god, no, _I’m_ a bloody idiot,” the woman says in her soft, low, delicious accent. “You’d think I’d be better about this, since I also have ex-girlfriends, not ex-boyfriends.”

“Yeah, you would think, huh?” Dani teases over the thrill that runs through her. She holds the woman’s gaze as the plane picks up speed, lifts off the tarmac. “You should work on that.”

“I will,” she says, nodding her head solemnly. Keeping her eyes locked on Dani’s still, she extends her hand the short distance across the armrest. “I’m Jamie, and I’m sorry I made an asshole assumption. Clearly you’re much too cool to be straight.”

“I’m Dani,” she says around her first genuinely unencumbered laugh in two days, taking Jamie’s offered hand, “and I’m happy to report you’ve successfully made it to cruising altitude.”

Jamie’s head whips around at that, like she’s remembered she was in the middle of a panic attack, then settles back on Dani with an awed smile.

“Blimey, that was amazing. You should make a career out of talking people off ledges, you know.”

Dani laughs again, feeling more herself with every passing minute. “Not too far off from what I do, actually. I’m a teacher, so I spend a good portion of each day convincing dramatic twelve year olds that the sky isn’t falling.” 

From there, they launch into more typical seatmate talk: where ya from, what do you do? Dani listens, rapt, as Jamie tells her in that caramel voice that she’s lived in Davenport a little over a year, that she made the long and improbable move from London for her own dream job – _ironic_ – running an urban gardening program for foster youth aging out of the system, that she’s spent the last year exploring the US one petrifying plane ride at a time, the latest taking her to the Rocky Mountains.

They discover that they have several favorite restaurants and parks in common, and wonder aloud why they’ve never met before. Dani, in a stroke of boldness, says with a shrug, “Maybe it wasn’t time yet.”

When the captain announces over a heavy din of static the beginning of the initial descent, Dani curses in her head, wishing for the first time in her life that a flight were longer. Over the course of the two hours, she’s laughed more with Jamie than she has in weeks. They’ve shared her revenge-purchased gummy bears, Jamie wholeheartedly agreeing that a sugar binge is in order. They’ve discovered a shared taste for mystery novels, have traded several recommendations and promises to check them out. They’ve commiserated over mismatched takeout tastes with exes, Jamie slyly adding that she wouldn’t trust a lesbian who didn’t like sushi, nearly making Dani spit soda into the seat in front of her.

And now they have to say goodbye. They stretch the conversation as long as they can, still going strong as the seatbelt sign comes on, as the ground nears, Dani reminding Jamie to breathe, breathe, almost there now.

Dani can tell that Jamie’s as reluctant to end their time together as she is, and is unspeakably grateful when, just as the plane is bumping into the jet bridge and the people around them rise, Jamie takes initiative.

“Um, thank you so much, I couldn’t’ve gotten through this without you. Could I take you to dinner sometime, to say thanks? We can get sushi, if you want.” Jamie’s mouth quirks up on one corner, like she’s enjoying already having a cheeky inside joke as much as Dani is.

“I mean, it was truly no problem,” Dani says, grinning as she adds, “If anything, I should take you out for drinks to thank you for listening to my sob story.”

“Ah, yes, I s’pose so,” Jamie nods sagely. “Lot of payback needed here. I hate having outstanding debts, you know. Best if we take care of this sooner than later.” Dani feels the smile spreading before Jamie has even finished her proposition. “Shall we start this week?”

“Absolutely. I’m free, well, I’m free every night now,” Dani laughs, and keeps laughing as Jamie pulls her phone out to trade numbers. She laughs because it’s true, and because it could sound pathetic, but somehow doesn’t. She laughs at her own brazenness, the uncharacteristic cards-on-the-table flippancy brought on by the particular circumstances of a post-breakup airplane _meeting someone_. She laughs because she knows enough to know that’s what this is: that she and Jamie will go on to have at least a date or two, and within the week she’ll no longer be able to say she’s only ever kissed one woman. 

After they disembark, Jamie and Dani walk side-by-side as far as the baggage claim. Unlike Dani, Jamie has luggage to wait for, and as much as Dani doesn’t want their conversation to end, she knows it’s going to, either now or in the parking deck where it will feel more awkward. Plus, they’ve made a date for Tuesday evening, dinner and drinks and _see where that takes us_. So, for now, she reaches down, gives Jamie’s hand one squeeze and Jamie’s eyes one last lingering look before turning and walking, calm and curious, towards whatever happiness lies in store for her next.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading, friends! Much more to come; glad you're here!  
> xo,  
> knope


	4. willow

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Life was a willow and it bent right to your wind....

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We travel further along the Swift road with my first offering. After the brilliance that has shone before, I feel humbled to be involved. That's what happens when you make friends with some of the best fic writers out there. 
> 
> Some light smut in this one. If you squint.
> 
> The response to this has been so lovely. Thank you! 
> 
> \- Clom

There is a common misconception that every story starts somewhere. Dani, if pressed, would have trouble nailing down where this story began. Perhaps, if she thought about it, it could be a rainy Tuesday in late fall, the cold rain sleeting against her window making the wipers work overtime. Through the dim haze of dusk she can just make out the car by the side of the road, hood propped up, and a sodden, freezing figure bent over it.

But, perhaps, that’s too late. Because there is so much before that, so much that explains everything after. If she starts there, then the story doesn’t make sense, none of it makes sense without what comes before. Perhaps it’s the argument they had, standing in her tiny living room with a voice slowly escalating as her words go unheard, or worse, unheeded. Not long before the storm, true, but long enough. Perhaps that was the moment that she started giving away pieces of herself just to stop the arguments.

Still, that makes no sense without moving backwards in time, arms windmilling as the years fly past in the wrong direction.

A young girl, sat on a river bank under the shade of a tree. She runs her fingers down the fronds of the willow as it leans across her. It’s like shelter, the way it crowds around her, dipping down to drink from the water. It’s her little cocoon, her safe space from the hollowed out nature of her home.

Her father, slowly fading away – thinner every day, less able to get out of his chair. Her mother, slowly downing the clear liquid in her glass that Dani knows isn’t water.

Every day, everyone getting a little bit thinner and her life getting a little more brittle. This world though, caught between the gentle swaying boughs, trailing threads, this is Dani’s. And then he walks in. He just walks in, cracking in to her little shell.

“What are you doing sitting here?”

“Looking at the river.” She stares at him, because he’s clearly an idiot. What else would she be doing here? He looks new, young, like she could push him in to the river and no one would know. “What’s your name?”  
  


“Eddie.” He sniffs, rubs his nose with his sleeve. “What’s yours?”

“Dani. Where do you live?” He points, gives an address. It’s right next door to her. Explains the moving van Dani had spotted that morning.

“Do you have a best friend?” She looks him up and down, narrow eyed and thinking. He’s in here, after all, and he seems fairly unlikely to be a threat.

He shakes his head. “No. Just my brothers.”

“Good.” She says firmly. “Good.”

That, she supposes, is a beginning. The beginning of something anyway, even if it isn’t the beginning of this. A flurry of events, a coffin lowered into the dirt, a house much warmer than her own, Eddie’s cold chapped lips pressed into hers. The beginning of something.

Perhaps it’s the clenching, cold, screaming feeling in her chest. Perhaps that was the beginning, sitting in her room clutching the brand new ring in her hand, squeezing until the tiny gem cuts into her palm and praying, praying that the pounding will ease. This new, panicked feeling, that sucks all the air out of her chest and makes the room sway, may never leave her, she thinks.

Perhaps this too is a beginning.

Eddie, hard on her arm. Eddie, his love steady, steady and slowly pushing her down into the dirt. Eddie, beseeching her, why start another year of teaching when they’re just getting married anyway. Dani’s voice, rising like the tide of panic within her. Dani agreeing to work part-time just to appease him. Dani giving away so much of herself right at the beginning.

A beginning, perhaps.

Somewhere, though, there’s a middle. A storm so heavy that you could ride a ship down the gutters. A car, broken down on the side of the road.

Dani pulls over. This is a small town, and it’s possible that no one else will pull over because it’s possible no one else will drive by for hours. The figure, shivering in the rain as they poke into the engine looks small, slender, wrapped in a red checked flannel shirt that’s soaked through.

It’s only when Dani grabs her umbrella, steps out into the rain and finds that it’s almost homeopathic against the driving water, only when she stumbles forward to the other car, that she realises that the figure is in fact female.

“You alright?” She yells.

“Peachy.” Comes the reply. A face comes up to look at her. It’s… very wet. The whole bedraggled mess of a woman is sopping wet and possibly more beautiful than Dani has ever seen in her life. Women this beautiful exist in art books about paintings hanging on distant shores, famous museums. They do not exist in Iowa, on the side of the road, mud to their mid shins.

“Need a lift?” Dani is getting wetter by the second.

There’s a barely audible sigh, and the clunk of a tool hitting metal. “Yeah. That would be great. Pretty sure it’s more dead than I can fix.”

English, Dani realises. She’s English. Soft, gentle, lilting and gorgeous voice – fits the face, and so very English. The kind of English that you certainly don’t find in the middle of Iowa on a November evening. By mutual unspoken agreement they move to the car, stranger grabbing a duffel bag on the way, rush into the dry as fast as possible. The stranger looks down.

“I’m going to get your seats wet.”

“They’re vinyl, they’ll cope.” Dani gives her a grin. “I’m Dani by the way.”

She offers a hand and a slender one tucks in. It’s oddly calloused for its otherwise very elegant shape.

“Jamie. Thanks, I think I was starting to icicle.”

Dani laughs. It’s not that funny but she laughs because something in her chest had taken flight and it feels like the panic she’s used to but not quite. Different. A nervous laugh, one that makes the so called Jamie raise an eyebrow slightly.

“Uh. We can call Reggie to get your car towed. He’ll take it to the garage.”

“Reggie huh?”

“Only tow for fifty miles,” Dani offers. “Only garage for fifty too.”

“Guess I’m going to meet Reggie then.” Jamie pulls the sticky wet flannel away from her chest and grimaces. “Ugh. Is there a motel in town?”

Dani gives her an easy grin. “Two. I’ll drop you off at the cleaner one.”

  
That makes Jamie laugh, releasing more of the weird feeling in Dani’s chest.

Strange.

Dani drives slowly, the road not too great and her vision obscured by the sheet of water pouring from the sky. She drives slowly to be safe, not to absorb this unusual occurrence in her otherwise very usual life.

“What on earth are you doing out here?”

“I was driving,” Jamie says wryly. “Until I heard a clunk.”

“Oh.”

“Mmm. Don’t know enough about cars to fix it. Thought maybe something had come loose but… not my forte.”

Dani grips the steering wheel. She wants, quite desperately, to know what Jamie’s forte is.

“You’re… not from around here.”

Jamie grins again. “Noticed that did you. From across the pond.”

“Don’t get a lot of foreigners in Iowa,” Dani says, hoping it comes off as conversational. “Even less in Williamsburg.”

“Can’t imagine why there’s not a huge tourist pull to this booming metropolis,” Jamie is looking out the window as a Dunkin Donuts store rolls past and Dani would be insulted if she didn’t agree so much.

“Hey, wouldn’t complain, you’re about to spend a few days here. May want to butter up the locals.”

She feels, as well as watches, Jamie’s eyes scan her up and down. The heat that trails from them leaves Dani’s skin alight, though she can find nothing but curiosity and warmth in the gaze. “Well, if they’re all as nice as you I’m sure I won’t have any trouble.”

Dani swallows, and though the idea of Jamie leaving her car and walking away seems like the worst one ever, she’s also eternally grateful when the Motel Williamsburg sign comes into view. They both stare at it, the giant No Vacancy lit up in red.

“Worth asking,” Dani says, swallowing. “Sometimes they still have rooms.”

“Ok,” Jamie says, and if she’s dubious, Dani can’t tell.”

But there are no rooms. There are no rooms at any of the motels in town that Dani drives to, all three, including the flea bag one she’d hoped not to have to stop at. There is, apparently, a soybean conference in town.

“Shit,” Jamie mutters under her breath. “I… is there a bus terminal or something? Maybe if I bus it into the city I can find somewhere.”

Dani feels the butterflies in her chest take flight. “That sounds dumb. Why don’t you stay at my place, I have a spare room.” As the words leave her, completely insane as they are, she doesn’t feel the familiar clench of panic. She feels something very different and she doesn’t know what to do with that.

“With you?” Jamie, it seems, is just as incredulous.

Dani shrugs. “There’s probably nowhere in town to stay. And you may as well wait till tomorrow and see how long you’re car is going to take before you hop on a bus out of town.”

Jamie looks at her, so many things behind her grey green eyes that Dani feels almost breathless returning the stare.

“I… that would be amazing but how do you know I’m not a serial killer.”

Dani cocks her head. “Are you?”

“No.”

  
“Well that works out then doesn’t it.”

So it’s a beginning, or a middle, of sorts. If Dani thinks about it later, it’s probably both: Jamie standing in her small living room looking around at the space that is wholly hers. It’s the first space that’s ever been all hers, this tiny two bedroom flat. It’s not her mothers house, or a dorm room – it’s all hers, and the mere thought of giving it up causes that clenching in her chest to coalesce fast. Eddie is constantly on her to move in with him, a request she’s denied repeatedly. She’s not ready, she tells him, not yet.

Jamie, in her sodden wet flannel looks around without judgement at the simple décor, the books, the photos lining the walls. At the movie posters so sneered at by her mother – she’s too old for such things apparently, and Jamie just takes it all in.

Dani guides her to the tiny spare bedroom with its single bed and neat desk. Dani hands her towels and points to the bathroom, tries not to shiver when thinking about Jamie in her shower, Jamie wet in the steam instead of the rain. Jamie in her house.

It’s something, having Jamie in her space, freshly showered, feeding her casserole and salad at her tiny kitchen table. It’s something, listening to her lilting accent as she answers Dani’s questions about how she ended up stranded in the middle of Iowa. A trip across the country, long imagined, finally realised. Big land, fresh air, new eyes, and a car that had seen better days as it turns out. Jamie looks rueful but amused at herself nevertheless.

Jamie, a gardener and landscaper by trade, whose eyes light up when talking about plants and soil and growth until she realises she’s been talking for five minutes non stop to Dani who has her chin on her hand, elbow on the table and thinks she could listen to this forever. The pink that dusts across her cheeks when she realises she’s been caught in a monologue make Dani’s chest pulse.

Jamie, who has a whole life outside of Williamsburg and outside of Iowa, and is the freshest air that Dani has ever tasted.

It is, a beginning.

It is the beginning of so many things, and one of them, is an ending. Because everything has a time, and this one has been sliding slowly, like mud sinking into a riverbank. Eddie, in her living room, unannounced, the next morning.

“Brought you coffee.”

“Thanks,” Dani says brightly. She’s already had one, but she takes it anyway. It’s too early for him to be here, in her space. Here, as she’s readying herself for school, readying herself to take Jamie to Reggie’s garage on the way. It’s too early for him to be crowding her like this.

It’s too early for his frown and hissed anger at finding someone else here. A stranger in Dani’s house. Someone Eddie hasn’t personally vetted, is how Dani thinks it goes.

“What if she’s a serial killer?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“You can’t have her stay here, you don’t know her.”

“Well I wasn’t going to leave her on the side of the road in a storm Eddie. That’s not the right thing to do.”

“You don’t know her, she could be anyone!”

“She’s a lost English woman stranded in the middle of nowhere Eddie. Where is she going to stay? There’s no where for her to go.”

“Dani, you need to start thinking smarter.”

It’s definitely too early, too late and all the places in between for this. Dani gives him a look and knows that he reads it. A step too far, a phrase too much. He pivots.

“What if I wanted to come over?”

Dani looks at him, just looks at him. The face she has loved her whole life, the soft edges somehow harsher in this morning light. Eddie has changed. Or maybe he hasn’t. Dani may have. Something has shifted, and she can feel it, as the clenching in her chest gets _louder_ somehow.

“She’s only here till her car gets fixed. There was a soybean conference.”

Her non-sequitur goes unchallenged. Her thoughts unheeded. Her voice unheard. Her arm, tight under his grip, though he would never hurt her.

Jamie, emerging after Eddie has gone, shirt tucked in and ready for the day. She is somehow more beautiful in the same filtered grey morning light. Apologies on her lips and chagrined look on her face. It’s not Jamie’s fault Eddie is an unmitigated ass these days.

It’s not Jamie’s fault that Dani’s chest is full of butterflies.

It’s not Jamie’s fault that the car will take four days to get parts and be fixed and that apparently, soybean conferences go on forever. Jamie, who has wandered up from the garage to the school, hands in her pockets, to find Dani on her lunch-break and let her know. Jamie, who sheepishly says she’ll find a bus to the big city.

Dani, who grasps her by the sleeve like Jamie is a lottery ticket flying in the wind. Dani who insists, _insists,_ that Jamie is welcome at hers for the full four days. Dani, who can taste a new beginning, beguiling on her tongue. She bends towards it like a willow in the breeze, dipping into the river.

She bends.

Jamie, to whom she rushes home that evening, haven given up her keys without thought during the day. When has Dani ever been this reckless? Jamie, who even more sheepishly, admits to not being able to cook but insists on buying them take-out. The very least she can do, she says.

And Dani bends a little more.

Jamie, who was such a stranger in her house last night and yet now feels like the most comfortable pillow on her couch, the one you hold when you’re watching your favourite film. Sitting here, in the lamplight of the evening talking like they’re old friends, trading stories of pasts unseen and paths already taken. Dani, feeling like her own stories of classrooms and college and corn mazes must pale in significance to a life from England, to a trek across America, to friends with foreign names like Owen, and places she’s never heard of. But Jamie listens like they’re fresh tracks for her too, hanging on her every word as Dani hangs on Jamie’s.

They talk music, tastes completely out of step, but books, a full hour spent on interrupting each other in gleeful delight, swapping favourites, sighing with remembrances of happiness and losing ones-self in a narrative. Jamie’s grey green eyes crinkling in the lamplight and Dani’s heart, clenching in her chest. They find so many commonalities and differences, switching topics with ease. It’s so easy. Too easy.

Dani’s chest clenching in a whole different way when her mother phones, demanding to know what the hell she’s thinking. Eddie has told her. _Eddie has phoned her and told her_. The anger rises in Dani like a tide, like a storm, buffeting her this way and that as she hangs up the phone mid Karen Clayton rant.

“What if she’s a serial killer?”

She’s an adult goddamit and she’ll bend anyway she likes.

The spell, now broken, Jamie looking out of place again, sorry for her own presence despite Dani’s constant reassurances.

Jamie, just a wall away in a single bed, as Dani lies in her double, head on the pillow as she imagines she can hear Jamie breathe. Jamie, the whole notion of her swirling around and invading her morning, her evening, her night, and now her dreams.

The next day, Friday, moving easily through the kitchen and waking early to make coffee and breakfast. Dani is smiling, waiting, happy for the day to begin in a way that she hasn’t been for oh so long. A whole weekend stretched out in front of her, with Jamie here, car not ready till Monday.

She gives Jamie, doubtful look on her face, the keys to her car. A lift to work and a lift home is all she asks, but the town is spread wide and Jamie can use it more than she can. There is chatter in the break-room, chatter in Dani’s ear. A stranger in town is news, especially one with an accent, a pretty smile and one who is _staying at Dani’s house._

“But what if she’s a serial killer.”

“She’s not.”

“But… she could be!”

And Dani finds that she doesn’t care. The words flow over her, like river on rocks, worn over time. Eddie’s angry face at the school gate at three in the afternoon. “It’s our date night.”

“Won’t hurt us to miss one.”

“Danielle, this is insane.”

“Eddie, I’m just helping out a lost traveller. It’s hardly the end of the world. She’s lovely you know, if you’d take the time to meet her.”

“She could be a serial killer! Your mother -”

“Eddie O’Mara if you ever call my mother again to complain about something I’ve done, I can guarantee they won’t find enough of your body to put you back together again.”

If the stunned look on his face is anything to go by, the beginning of Dani finding steel in her spine is a bit of a shock.

“I didn’t – I mean – I’m sorry – I just…”

“We’ll have lunch tomorrow, come meet Jamie. She really is lovely.”

Jamie, who really is lovely.

Jamie, who is waiting for her, leaning against Dani’s own car, tight jeans and a band t-shirt with a brown leather jacket, worn and much loved, looking phenomenal on her frame. Jamie, who makes Dani’s chest and stomach tighten in a way that she has only had fleetingly in the past.

Like seeing a television behind glass in a shop, distant layers, and then someone taking you to a movie theatre.

Like breathing fresh cool air for the first time in your life.

Jamie, who looks apologetic again, willing to catch a greyhound bus to the city to avoid causing any more trouble for Dani. Jamie, who has been asked to her face if she’s a serial killer for the unbelievable crime of getting lunch at the local cafe.

“Eddie can get over himself,” Dani says, determinedly.

“Don’t mean to cause trouble in your relationship though.”

“Men,” Dani says dismissively, bustling around her kitchen as Jamie sits at her tiny table watching Dani make dinner. “I mean really, sometimes they’re ridiculous right?”

Jamie looks at her, head tilt. “Uh, yeah. I suppose.”

“Do you have one?” Dani shakes her head. “A boyfriend I mean, or a … someone?”

Jamie squints at her, as if sizing her up and Dani feels the shiver that goes up and down her arms at the look. “Er, no, on my own. Have been for a long time.”

Dani feels jealous and not at the same time. “Sounds like heaven to be honest.”

“Been with him awhile?”

“Since we were kids.”

“Looks like you’re planning forever.” Jamie nods at her left hand where the ring suddenly feels heavier than it ever has and Dani twists it unthinkingly in response, like it’s itching her finger now she notices it there.

“Yeah. Yeah, I guess.”

It’s an odd response and they both know it, but Jamie is kind enough not to say anything. Dani feels the panic come on in her chest. She flails internally for something to ward it off. “Hang around here long enough and you’ll have a few proposals soon. Not often a beautiful woman comes to town unspoken for.”

Jamie looks at her, just looks at her and Dani feels her panic head towards eleven.

“Beautiful huh?”

Or possibly twelve. “Uh huh,” Dani squeaks. “Gorgeous.”

Jamie’s smile, crooked and adorable. “They’ll be barking up the wrong tree then, I imagine.”

“Not much for settling down? Find a nice fellow?”

“Not much for fellows to be honest.” Jamie scratches her head, not meeting Dani’s eyes for the first time ever in a conversation. “Well, or settling down.”

Dani swallows because the meaning is unmistakable and it’s not like she didn’t know. She’d known. She’d pushed this conversation because she’d known. Every look, every laugh, every sparkle in Jamie’s eyes and the occasional lingering of them, she’d known.

And now she _knew_.

“Domestic endurance is not the sport for everyone,” Dani smiles at her, gratified at Jamie’s easy laugh back.

“That’s a hell of a way of putting it. Seems like you’re going for gold though,” Jamie nods at the ring again, purposefully, now definitely looking in Dani’s eye.

All she can do is smile, smile and turn back to the counter to finish dinner. Smile, mutter under her breath “Am I?” and try not to feel the last of her air squeezed out. It’s all she can do to slide through the evening, the ease of Jamie’s company crowding her. The ease of their conversation a complete antithesis to the raging, _raging_ inside her. Torrents now cascading, dragging tree boughs and roots with them, threatening to wash away the banks.

Saturday morning, a whole weekend, Dani makes pancakes and watches the delight on Jamie’s face at the first bite. A walk down by the river, Jamie stopping to touch trees and plants as she goes, a look of intense care on her face making Dani’s insides shiver. The rain drives them back inside. Eddie, it would appear, is sulking with a refusal to answer Dani’s texts and invitations to come over and spend time with them both. She won’t pretend she isn’t happier this way, her bubble unburst, but she does her duty as always – inviting him.

If Eddie is being a child, then Judy is at least her usual hospitable self and invites both Dani and Jamie to Sunday lunch.

Dani watches and watches and feels it growing inside her, this urge to surge forward and connect. Jamie, who has just innocently and accidentally wandered in her life and with her smile, her words, her eyes so damn beautiful, has thrown Dani’s life into disarray and she can’t even be blamed for it. Jamie, whose hand Dani wants to hold. Jamie, with those damn pink lips, that Dani can’t take her eyes off and here, as they sit watching a movie on a rainy Saturday afternoon, Dani isn’t even sure she’s being subtle anymore.

How much more can she hide inside this shell, this bubble, inside her own chest? She isn’t sure but god she wants Jamie to reach out, just reach out and offer something. But Jamie, Jamie is watching the movie while Dani pretends not to watch Jamie. Jamie, who is a beginning that Dani wants more than she’s ever wanted anything in her whole life.

Jamie, who is looking at her, because now Dani isn’t even bothering with the pretence of looking at the television.

“Dani…” A breath, a question, a warning, all in one word. And all Dani wants is to hear her name fall from those lips again.

She surges forwards, surges. Lips, surprise and ambush, taken. Soft and warm, they make a startled noise before hands come up and cup her jaw, hands come up and cradle her like she’s something precious and their lips are suddenly in sync, moving, moving and Dani is bending, bending in.

But Jamie, Jamie is pulling back.

“Dani…”

Jamie is touching her lips and staring at her and it feels like the room is collapsing in on Dani, pressure in her head, her chest, everything suddenly blurred. What has she done?

“I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry,” Dani whispers. But she’s not, not really. All she can feel is Jamie’s lips on her own, the oh so brief but altogether intoxicating taste of Jamie. She scrambles backwards, off the couch, standing up. “Oh god, I’m so sorry.”

Jamie is looking at her but she doesn’t seem angry, doesn’t seem hurt, just confused. “Dani it’s OK. Alright. It’s alright.” But now Jamie looks as lost as she does and all Dani wants to do is step forward and take her hand, kiss her again. Jamie, who has rolled into her life and turned it upside down. Jamie, who will roll right out again in a day.

“You… I don’t do this!” Dani’s hands move fast with her speech. “I mean I’ve never done this. Don’t… don’t think I do this. I don’t invite people to my house and kiss them. I don’t… I’ve never… oh god, I’m so sorry.”

Jamie is smiling at her now, standing, moving closer. “I didn’t reckon you did.”

Dani’s hands, twisting on each other, Jamie moving ever closer. “I’m sorry.”

“Are you?”

Jamie, almost dangerously close now, but stopping just far enough that Dani realises it’s her choice. Jamie, Jamie who is being oh so clear in her movements, her expressions, stepping just close enough to be in reach but it has to be Dani’s choice.

“Are you?” Jamie whispers again.

Dani is surging forward, carried on a wave. Jamie, opening to her, accepting her, kisses like silk and fire, Dani’s body a foreign land now. Jamie, warm and steady under her hands, all too ready for Dani to find skin and teeth and taste.

Moving, taking Jamie with her by her hand and determinedly leading her to the bedroom. Jamie, the first person ever that she’s wanted to see and touch and explore. Jamie, letting her, her own hands carefully peeling back the layers on Dani like she’s seeing her. Like Dani is being seen for the first time ever.

Dani, so sure for the first time in her life, pushing Jamie down into the cool sheets so that she can feel and taste and explore. Jamie, hot under her fingers, arching, asking, guiding, thanking, swearing and writhing when Dani’s fingers slip to her, slide in. Inside someone for the first time ever, no, not someone, Jamie. Finding just how much she can bring with a movement, a twist, a beckon, each tentative move showing her more and more until Jamie is sobbing her name, hips canting and Dani is doing this, Dani is making this happen.

Jamie, pulling her in, holding her, murmuring words that Dani can barely register over the throbbing in her ears, her body. Jamie, taking her time, tongue and fingers light across Dani’s skin. Dani, lost in a world of sensation and, finally, understanding. Dani, finding heaven not once, but twice, at the hands of someone paying attention to her, listening, feeling, meeting her half-way. Jamie, taking her apart, one molecule at a time and building her back together a whole new Dani.

How she feels on a Sunday morning: a whole new Dani. Eating breakfast unable to take her eyes of Jamie, who won’t stop giving her completely understanding and utterly unfair looks. Jamie, who she can’t help but stop to kiss. Jamie, dragging her back to bed, being dragged to the couch, Jamie, who gives herself to Dani artlessly and openly.

They call off Judy, because Dani knows that she won’t be able to hide this. She knows that she can’t stop herself from falling open, all of the truth spilling out on to the lunch table as she tries not to stare at the newness in herself reflected in Jamie. Instead, she feigns a headache and Judy says she’ll send Eddie around.

Eddie does not come, still sulking in his way. Dani feels an ending itching under her skin, ready to burst, because Dani is relieved. So relieved, that it feels like breathing after drowning. So many things scrambling around in her brain, in her chest, vying for attention, for pole position, she’s forced to ignore them. Because the hot, wet stroke of Jamie’s tongue, the languid feel of her fingers finding places Dani didn’t even know were sensitive, are all that matters right now.

She doesn’t want this to end. This Sunday, spent wrapped in another person. This Sunday, finding Jamie in her and herself in Jamie, revelations and arching pleasure, more than she thought possible. And as Sunday bleeds into Sunday evening, as she rests in Jamie’s arms in her bed, in the cocoon they’ve made for themselves, she knows everything has changed. This is not something she can walk away from, not something she can have and then store away as a memory. As Jamie’s fingers drift up and down her arm, leaving trails of goosebumps and tenderness in their wake, she knows.

Words spoken in the hushed twilight, acknowledgement of something nascent, but special. Notes, written on paper with delicate scent, signed with love, a ring in an envelope. A bag, packed easily and fast, amazing how little you need when you walk away from everything you’ve ever known.

Monday, standing at the side of a car, looking at the future and feeling the wind of the past behind her, Dani feels oddly at peace. There should be fear, anxiety, crushing her from the chest outwards but there is just, peace.

A beginning, and also an end. A story is rewritten, and the narrative, moves on.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For M, K and C. 
> 
> You buggers really are the best.


	5. cowboy like me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> AU - inspired by track 11, "cowboy like me".
> 
> Dani never expected to fall in love during a heist set up. Insert one Jamie Taylor.
> 
> -D.M 🖤

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's great to see you all enjoying our Swift inspired Dani x Jamie stories. We appreciate every last one of you.

-  
  
It doesn’t even bother her anymore – the leer of a half-dressed man as he watches her slip back into a dress and heels. She ignores it, remembers it for what it is; a means to an end, the very reason she is able to wear these red bottomed heels in the first place and have at least eight other pairs in her closet at home.  
  
“Are you sure you won’t stay?”  
  
Dani turns just her head to look, her blonde hair falling down over half of her face. She smirks at the man in the four poster hotel room bed, huffs out a small laugh and then sighs.  
  
“You know the deal, Tommy,” she says, walking slowly around the bed to him. He sits up, his face mere centimetres from hers, and she stops him with a finger before he can kiss her. “Ah ah, what were the rules?”  
  
Tommy grunts, slumps back down onto his back. “No touching.”  
  
“No touching.” Dani repeats. She turns, her heels clank on the wooden floor as she walks towards the door. She stops and turns back to Tommy. “Look after yourself, Mr Smith.” She winks, walks down the hall of this ridiculously expensive hotel suite towards the door, swipes a Rolex watch from a side table and drops it into her clutch bag.  
  
It's amazing what men will do. Fully grown, mostly married rich men that only want the company of a woman who isn’t their dried up, nagging wife (as they put it), and despite the no touching rule – no touching at all, ever – Dani is high demand. Luxurious. Expensive.  
  
It’s dangerous, this lifestyle, and she knows it. But being able to bring a person to their knees using nothing but her eyes and her words has become second nature. A disguise - an alter ego, even. When she is the companion of these people, she isn’t Dani Clayton, she is Alexa. _Just_ Alexa.  
  
Alexa is distracting. Distracting enough that she is able to steal whatever she damn well pleases. A watch. A ring. Even a _crown_ from one man who was so obsessed with himself that he called himself King. She collects these little trinkets, along with the thousands of pounds she makes each time she escorts someone with more money than sense to a function or a dinner or an out of town trip. Never seeing any of them more than once.  
  
In the hotel lobby, she walks to the doors with her head held high. She looks like she belongs here, in the world of the rich and famous. As she exits the building and walks down the steps, her phone buzzes.  
  
**\- SPENCE -**  
**Need you for one last job. 1pm – usual place.**  
  
Dani frowns at her phone. Its 10.30am and she needs to shower and change. She flags down a cab and gets in. Her London apartment is on the other end of town, in a less obvious posh area, but still suits her desire for luxury.  
  
At her apartment complex, the doorman opens the door for her, greets her with a comforting smile. She walks through, says good morning to him and heads for the elevator. She takes the moment of silence to check the watch she took from Tommy's, grins at it, immediately knows it’s worth and places it back in her bag. Even if he realises it’s missing, he knows nothing about her – not even her real name – and Dani is clever enough to collect payment in cash before the meetings begin.  
  
Her apartment is clean, modern, shiny white walls and black counters. Huge art pieces and statues. A bar that spans half the length of the living area in black and chrome. The entire outside wall is glass, looking out over the London skyline. The view never fails to make Dani's heart flutter. She has worked hard for this. This is her paradise.  
  
She busies herself – showers, changes into skinny blue jeans, chunky heeled boots, a low cut white blouse and a black blazer.  
  
Spence. A... friend. Maybe the best friend Dani has made since being in London. Not the usual kind of friendship. They don’t hang out, they hardly even talk, but when Dani had first arrived in London, she’d gotten herself into a potentially fatal situation that Spence had helped her out of. This began the “training." Spence, being an older, wiser woman with a killer attitude and an almost deadly body, taught Dani everything she needed to know about seduction.   
  
So now, when she’s leaning into a man, watching the way his eyes scream for her to touch him or the way he begs to be able to touch her, she remembers Spence. The way Spence did the same thing to her years ago. Had her mouth watering, hands trembling, core aching. Never had she realised how _teasing_ could be just as addictive as sex.   
  
The car park is filled with luxury cars, hers being a bright white Audi TT convertible. Not the most prestigious, but it suits her. She beeps the doors open and gets in. The sound of the engine echoes through the car park and she drives off.  
  
Only 20 minutes later, she pulls into a clearing off a road. She knows from being here before that the building on the right, the one that looks to be abandoned, most definitely is not. She parks up beside a Range Rover and gets out. There are two other cars here too and a motorbike. This is big – whatever this _one last job_ is – it's big.  
  
The building used to be a factory of some sort, the ground floor still home to old machines covered in dust and sheets. Dani walks up the stairs and in through a door.  
  
“Clayton.”  
  
Dani looks to her left and sees, for the first time in what has to be at least a year, Spence. She is tall, slim, fucking gorgeous, blonde hair that stops at her shoulders and bangs that somehow leave her looking mysterious. Dani takes a moment before a smile creeps it’s way across her lips.  
  
“Spence.” She says, walking towards her.  
  
Spence takes her by the arms, looks her up and down and then pulls her into a hug. “It's great to see you.” She lowers her hands down Dani's arms and takes one hand, pulls her towards another room. “This is Dani. Dani, this is everyone. We'll get to introductions soon, but thank you all for coming.”  
  
Dani leans back against a wall when Spence lets go of her hand and walks away. She takes a moment to look around the room at the other people -  
  
\-- A man, with a scar across his cheek. He looks angry, sat leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, one hand holding his other fist.  
  
\-- A woman with black hair, chewing on gum, sat with one leg resting on the other, bouncing it impatiently.  
  
\-- A man, leaning against a wall. His expression is soft, only hardened by the thick black moustache sat above his top lip.  
  
\-- A woman, sat in a chair with one leg bent, foot resting on the seat. She’s slim, black pants hug her legs perfectly, the red flannel shirt she is wearing is only half way buttoned up showing sharp collarbones, her neck, a jawline that makes Dani need to swallow a lump in her throat just looking at it.  
  
She doesn’t realise she’s staring until her eyes lift from the woman’s neck to her full lips. Lips that are turned up in one corner. Then eyes – blue-green eyes that are staring right back at her, eyebrows slightly furrowed. Dani looks away quickly, tries to keep the embarrassing blush away from her cheeks after being caught.   
  
Spence starts talking and Dani tries to listen to the plan. But she’s distracted, glancing looks over at the brunette because _fuck_ , if she isn’t the hottest damn woman Dani has set eyes on in years.   
  
“Dani.” Spence says, startling her from her thoughts.  
  
“Yep?” Dani says, eyebrows raised expectantly.  
  
“You’ll be our distraction.” Spence says, winking.  
  
Scar face is Paul, he’s the muscle. Gum-chewer is Rose, she’s the clever one. Moustache man is Oliver, he’s the tech one. Curly-haired-goddess is Jamie, she’s the sleuth.  
  
Those details along with the actual plan: A casino. A million pounds. An elaborate plan to bring down London’s most famous casino that’s headed up by scum. Spence never does anything that isn’t warranted. She has proof that this particular man is involved in some very dodgy, very disturbing rings and she wants to see him fall. His entire empire too.   
  
“Are you in?” Spence asks, leaning forward with her hands on her desk, looking round at the people she has hand picked to help.   
  
“I’m in.” Dani says first, and the others quickly follow suit in agreeing.   
  
“Great. Dani, I need you and Jamie to scope it out tomorrow night, okay?” Spence announces.  
  
Dani gulps, nods her head and sneaks a look over at Jamie, who is nodding too.   
  
“Right. I’ll be back later. I’ve gotta go, but you lot need to get to know each other. The bar is set up out there, enjoy.” Spence leaves quickly, planting a passing kiss to Dani's cheek on her way out.   
  
Paul and Rose know each other, that’s obvious as they get up and leave the room together. Oliver and Jamie leave next and Dani follows behind them.   
  
It's been a while since she’s felt any kind of attraction to someone, probably since Spence – not that anything actually ever happened between them – but she can’t seem to tear her eyes away from Jamie.   
  
The room is spacious, all the old factory machines removed and replaced with old leather sofas and armchairs, huge rugs and mismatched furniture. Steel pillars still stretch from floor to ceiling here and there and the thick dust on the windows make the sunlight duller than it should be.   
  
“Beer?” Jamie asks Dani as they reach the bar.  
  
Dani nods, “Sure, thanks.”  
  
Jamie pops off the lid to a bottle of beer and places it in front of Dani and then holds out her hand, “Jamie Taylor, nice to meet you.”   
  
Dani takes her hand, shakes gently, “Dani Clayton. Nice to meet you too.”  
  
Jamie smiles and keeps hold of Dani's hand for a couple of seconds longer than would usually be normal for an introduction.  
  
The group sit around talking and drinking for what seems like hours. They get to know each others stories, their backgrounds, how they met Spence and they slowly get drunk.  
  
Paul and Rose are engaged, they met during their first job with Spence which was on board a cruise liner in the Mediterranean with a fantastic action-movie-come-romantic ending involving them escaping on a jet ski together.  
  
Oliver it seems was head hunted by Spence herself, he worked in a restaurant but his knowledge of computers and the dark web caught her attention.  
  
Jamie caught Spence red handed during a set up job. She’s a PI. This is all the information she gives away on the matter, which only lures Dani in further.  
  
The one thing the group of people in this room have in common is that they all want everything. They want riches and gold and cars and _everything_.   
  
By the time Spence walks back through the door, the room is filled with smoke and laughter and music. She sits on the sofa beside Dani and joins in, stealing the beer from her hand and drinking.   
  
“Tomorrow night,” Spence says, leaning in so Dani can hear her hushed voice, “I just need you to chat to the staff. Jamie will do the rest.” Spence pauses, looks over in the direction of Jamie and half laughs, “She's quite something. Never met anyone with an eye like hers.”  
  
When Dani takes a moment to go back to the bar and light up a cigarette, she’s joined shortly after by Jamie, who lifts herself up onto the bar to sit.  
  
“So, Clayton, you’re the _distraction_. Tell me,” Jamie pauses to light her own cigarette, “what exactly does that mean?”  
  
Dani leans forwards against the bar on her elbows, looks up at Jamie beside her. “It means I’ll be the one seducing Mr. Trent whilst you all rob him blind.”  
  
“Oh,” Jamie says, “sounds like my idea of a nightmare.”  
  
“It's not too bad, it's amazing the kind of power just words have.”  
  
“And by seducing you mean...?” Jamie fades out the sentence into a question.  
  
Dani laughs, pours herself a whisky from the bottle in front of her, takes a drag of the cigarette between her fingers and looks up at Jamie. “No touching. That’s my rule.”   
  
Jamie seems to understand, nods slowly. “Sounds like a good rule.” And she looks at her, the kind of look that tells Dani she wants to ask more... wants to _know_ more. But before Dani can elaborate, Spence is grabbing her by the hand and pulling her back towards the rest of the group.  
  
\-   
  
The next day, Dani cancels all her plans for the upcoming weeks. She doesn’t need the money anyway, but she does need to focus all of her attention on this job. And that would be easy if she could take her mind for _one_ second off the way Jamie was looking at her yesterday.  
  
She and Jamie are due to visit the casino this evening to scope it out. It’s also a chance for them to learn how to work together, and since they’ll be the main two people on the front line on the night, a chance to properly get their bearings. 

Her phone buzzes on the bed.

**\- JAMIE -**  
**Meet at The Dorchester. 6pm. Go to the desk, ask for Holmes.**  
  
Dani laughs. She knows just from spending the day before in Jamie’s company that she has a sense of humour, so the Sherlock reference doesn’t surprise her.  
  
She’s chosen a long black dress with a slit that goes up to the top of her right thigh, black heels and has her hair pulled back into a loose French braid. She grabs her clutch bag and rests the chain over her shoulder.  
  
When Dani walks through the doors at the Dorchester Hotel, she approaches the man standing behind the reception desk.   
  
“Can I help you, Miss?”  
  
“I’m here to see Holmes.” Dani says with a small smile.  
  
“Right this way, Miss.” The man nods, walks from behind the desk and Dani follows.  
  
She sees Jamie right away, standing beside the open fireplace with a glass of whisky in her hand, leaning with her other elbow on the mantelpiece. She’s wearing a black tux jacket with a white shirt unbuttoned all the way down to her navel. She looks simply scandalous.   
  
Jamie turns when she sees Dani, stands up straight, her lips turned up on one side into her signature smirk.   
  
“Clayton.” Jamie says.   
  
“Sherlock.” Dani smirks back at her.   
  
Jamie walks to one side where there are two armchairs in front of the fire and a round glass table complete with a decanter of whisky and a crystal glass. Jamie places her glass down and pours them each a drink. Dani watches. First, it’s the way Jamie’s fingers grip the neck of the bottle with one hand and the way the fingers on her other hand hold up the bottom of the bottle. Then, it’s the slither of skin up the centre of Jamie’s torso, between her breasts (where Dani notes there is no bra), up to her throat. Then, her jawline that tenses as she concentrates on the pour.   
  
Dani finally averts her eyes, taking the glass as soon as Jamie has finished pouring. “Thank you.” She says, lifting it to her lips.  
  
Jamie sits down, sips her drink. “So, we didn’t get much chance to talk yesterday.”  
  
Dani can’t help but look at Jamie’s fingers as they tap against the side of her glass. “No,” she says before looking up at Jamie’s eyes, “Oliver likes to talk doesn’t he?”  
  
“Hm,” Jamie laughs, “yes he does.”  
  
Dani had picked up on a few things the day before. Jamie and Oliver know each other. Jamie isn’t from London. Jamie is a hundred percent gay. And Jamie is just as interested in life’s greatest luxuries as Dani is.  
  
“What part of America are you from?” Jamie asks.  
  
“Iowa. What part of England are you from?”  
  
“Nowhere you’d know. All over, really.”  
  
AThey settle into light conversation about what they do to earn their living. Dani is honest, she tells Jamie the details of what she does, explains exactly why Spence picked her for the task of distraction and seduction.   
  
Jamie clears her throat, looks briefly down at Dani's lips and hums, “I look forward to seeing you in action.”  
  
Dani chuckles and sits back in her chair. Jamie explains what she does. By trade, a PI. She helps rich women catch their douche-bag husbands cheating, helps give them enough evidence to rinse them dry in the divorce. But her sleight of hand, extreme attention to detail and charm provides her with the skill to swipe a wallet from anyone at any time. Like the man she just bumped into on the way back from the bathroom.  
  
“Easy.” Jamie says, dumping the wallet onto the table.  
  
“I’m impressed.” Dani says, nodding her head.  
  
Jamie picks up the wallet, opens it and pulls out the driving license. “This bottle is on... Francis Cole.” She laughs and pulls out the wad of notes. “We'd better go before he notices.” She drops the money and wallet on the table.   
  
Dani stands, grabs her bag. She can’t deny that she’s seriously impressed, a little bit tipsy and very much enjoying the thrill. Jamie grabs her hand, pulls her close and rushes them out of the door.   
  
Outside, Dani giggles excitedly, letting Jamie pull her by the hand over to a waiting taxi. They get into the back seats and Jamie instructs the driver to go to the casino. They’re silent now and Dani looks out of the window, but she can feel Jamie’s eyes on her, she looks back, watches Jamie’s gaze drag up her now exposed right thigh.   
  
The taxi pulls up outside the casino and Jamie gets out first, hurries around the other side and opens the door for Dani.  
  
Two con artists - _very good con artists_ \- walk into the casino hand in hand. First stop is the bar; they have to look like they belong. Dani orders a martini, Jamie a large whisky on the rocks and they take a seat at a blackjack table.  
  
Dani watches Jamie – it’s hard to do anything but. She watches her concentrate, sip her drink, bet and win and bet again. On one hand it’s confusing, the effect Jamie is having on her ability to focus. On the other hand, it’s calling out for her to explore. Loudly.  
  
But they have a job to do. So they split up. Jamie hits a poker table whilst Dani sits at the bar to befriend a member of staff. No bit of information is worthless, as Spence says. It's been an hour and it turns out that the staff enjoy their jobs, but hate the owner. Figures, Dani thinks, given what she knows about him. The young man behind the bar seems happy enough to share his feelings, especially with Dani shamelessly flirting with him.  
  
Jamie appears behind Dani, her hands resting either side of her on the bar. “Time to take this up a notch. Come with me.”  
  
Jamie takes Dani by the hand and walks them slowly around the circular room. There are slot machines and poker tables. Roulette tables and blackjack tables. Bars and betting stations. There’s music and laughter and chatter from customers.   
  
There’s Jamie, with her hand on the small of Dani's back ushering them through a door marked ‘Private’.  
  
“What are we doing in here?” Dani asks, looking down the hall in front of them.  
  
“Exploring.” Jamie says with an amused tone.   
  
They walk for a moment, slowly and quietly until they reach the end of the hall. There's a distant clang of metal, the sound of a door shutting and voices. Jamie jumps back, pulls Dani into a small space between two walls and holds her against the cold tiles.  
  
Dani's heart stops. The warmth of Jamie’s body pressed against her, the feeling of Jamie’s hand held against her mouth to keep her quiet, the look in her eyes so... _familiar_. All of it together makes her knees weak.  
  
Jamie is staring back at her, shushing quietly and Dani can feel something deep inside her tightening and lifting until she feels like she is about to fall over. She grabs onto Jamie’s jacket tightly until her knuckles turn white to try to ground herself.  
  
A second later, Jamie let’s go and Dani accidentally whines at the loss of contact. Jamie breathes out a laugh and takes her hand again. “Someone saw us, we’ve gotta go.”  
  
With a fast walk, they head back down the hall and out into the casino. Jamie keeps Dani held close, looking back over her shoulder as they increase speed to a slow run into the main lobby and then out into the outside air.  
  
“Come on, I know a place.” Jamie says, turning them down an alleyway.  
  
Dani notices that Jamie doesn’t let go of her hand and she can’t help the thrill the touch of her fingers bring. They walk through a door and into a nightclub. The lights are low, blue and red strobes showing the way. The music is almost deafening and there are people everywhere. Jamie pulls them to the dancefloor and leans in.  
  
“Dance with me, Clayton.” She says, her lips brushing against Dani's ear.  
  
Dani closes her eyes, shakes her head, “No.”  
  
She feels Jamie’s lips turn up into a smile, feels her breathe against her skin, sending a shiver down her spine. Jamie puts her hands gently onto Dani's waist, “Why?”  
  
“Dancing is a dangerous game.” Dani says, but her hands find their own way up Jamie’s back, pulling her in closer.  
  
It is dangerous. They’re cut from the same cloth, so independent and uninterested in love or companionship, but with Jamie’s hands and lips on her so lightly and the way she’s looking at her with eyes full of stars, Dani doesn’t think she can resist.  
  
Jamie moves her mouth just below Dani's ear, ghosts her lips there, “Dance with me, Dani.” Her voice is low, almost hoarse.  
  
The way Jamie says her name - the way Jamie says her name for the _first_ time since they met knocks the wind right out of her sails and she knows... she _knows_ she’s fucked.  
  
She simply nods and Jamie pulls her in close, her lips tickling down her neck. Dani feels her skin burn, her heart race and her core tighten. Jamie spins her around, her hands still on her waist, mouth now on the back of her neck as they move.  
  
They move and Jamie pulls Dani back against her. They dance like they’re the only two people in the room. Dani turns, her face close to Jamie’s, her hands around her neck, up into her hair. She grinds her body in, watches Jamie’s eyes darken and suddenly she forgets everything she has ever learnt and only feels a desire to be touched. To be touched _everywhere_.  
  
Jamie seems to read the signs and pulls Dani by her hand outside the club. They leave, walk down the street a little until Jamie stops, backs Dani up against the glass door of a closed library and pins her against it.  
  
Dani isn’t used to this kind of contact. She’s not used to any kind of contact, actually. But the rush of being handled by Jamie this way thrills her.  
  
Never has Dani met someone with the same kind of lifestyle, same kind of materialistic wants and needs that are only fed by a life of crime and seduction. But here she is, with Jamie, who she already feels like she knows - their similarities running so much deeper than just the surface of skin and words.  
  
So she surprises herself when she slides one hand up into Jamie’s hair and pulls her in, pressing their lips together and giving it everything she has. Jamie’s lips are soft and her tongue is tender and her hands, _god_ her hands are-  
  
Jamie pulls back abruptly. “Wanna go?”  
  
“Yes.” Dani answers quickly. She’s never wanted anything more.  
  
“My office is around the corner.” Jamie says before leaning back in to steal a kiss, tugging on Dani's bottom lip with her teeth.  
  
They walk away, Jamie once again pulling Dani by her hand and leading the way, taking charge as she has done all night. It’s new, because Dani is usually the one in control, but right now she has no idea where she is and only wants to give herself over completely to Jamie.  
  
Jamie unlocks a door marked “J.T. Investigations” and swings it open. Dani walks in. Her heart jumps when she hears the door lock behind her. It jumps again when she feels Jamie’s hands snake around her stomach.  
  
Jamie’s lips are on her neck again and Dani can’t contain the quiet moan that escapes her lips.  
  
“Christ, where did you come from, Dani?” Jamie husks into her ear.  
  
Dani breathes out a laugh, gasps when Jamie’s teeth sink into the side of her neck. She doesn’t respond, just reaches behind her to touch any part of Jamie that she can.  
  
“I’ve never wanted to touch anyone as badly as I want to touch you.” Jamie whispers, her hands moving to her hips and pressing slightly into them.  
  
Like it’s the most natural thing in the world, Dani says those two words that she keeps locked away in a vault, guarded by her own heart... “Touch me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Can I take this moment to thank you for reading and to thank the other 3 incredible writers involved in this for letting me be part of this emotional roller coaster.


	6. gold rush

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Everyone at Lloyd School is smitten with the new girl, and why not: she’s pretty, blonde, American. Well, almost everyone. Jamie Taylor just wants some peace and goddamned quiet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I want you fuckers to know that at the beginning of this project we set out to do "2-3K one-shots, but like, no hard word limit."  
> Me: HOLD MY BEER HERE'S 15 thousand words and my heart.  
> Hope you enjoy! 
> 
> Special thanks to dark_moonflower for her read for proper British-isms. (If something is wrong, take it up with her.) (jk jk)

The stone digs into the undersides of Jamie’s thighs beyond the hems of her cutoffs, even as it burns her with its stored sunlight. Still, she doesn’t move, just lets her heels fall harder against the face of the wall she’s sitting atop, kicking aimlessly, passing the time.

Jamie spends a large portion of her days passing the time. She always has. A vaguely unwanted child born to a rough family in rougher country, she hasn’t been _tended to_ like many other kids her age. No, she’s _passed the time_ , caring for her baby brother, staying out of the way of her mother’s revolving door of “gentleman callers” with their slippery gazes and fast hands. _Passing the time_ at the library, in the park, anywhere but home. When the axe finally fell – when finally, she reckons, the neighbors called the police enough times about a shouted row, a smell of burning, a baby crying endlessly into the night, she’d been given a choice: foster care or boarding school. An unheard of stroke of luck, an opening on scholarship thanks to her decent grades and clean record, one she only briefly considered turning down before being told that her chances of placement alongside her brothers were “essentially zero.”

So, with tears streaking both their faces, Jamie had lied through her teeth to little Mikey, had sworn he’d be well cared for, had promised she’d be back to visit soon. She would have told him anything see his sticky chubby grin take the place of quivering lip and fat tears. His short life had already been so cosmically unfair, she daily scraped and snatched for anything that could alleviate even a moment of the pain, give him a drop of the normalcy she had craved as a child. So, she’d stifled her own full-blown racking sobs until after he had been hauled into a car with a case worker, herself left alone to pass the time until the bus came to carry her and her one ratty secondhand suitcase south to Lloyd School.

Today, she’s passing the time as the other students – students who pass their summer holidays at family estates in the countryside, not group homes in the grit of the London outskirts – arrive back at school for the autumn term. They’re ushered into dorms by mothers laden with shopping bags and matched sets of luggage, fathers smoking pipes genially alongside well-polished cars, clapping their sons on their backs and kissing their daughters’ foreheads before sending them off into their bright, shiny futures.

As the only bus connecting the group home (“permanent residence,” her Lloyd transcript perversely calls it) to the village where the school is located is an early-morning commuter, she’s been passing the time here for some hours already. She’s moved her scant belongings into her room, staked a claim on the bed by the window – sometimes being ungodly early has its advantages – and is now passing the time watching her so-called peer group as it reassembles before her very eyes. Here’s Joann now, bouncing out of an expensive-looking town car and sporting a tan, the provenance of which Jamie and everyone else will have to hear all about, many times over. And right in time, here come her gentlemen-in-waiting: Andrew, Kyle, and Ian, hailed as the golden boys of the school, but who Jamie can only see as early prototypes of the men she spent her childhood avoiding, their leering eyes and teasing words a preamble for future tortures. Jamie pays mind to boys, though, like she does to cops, or shopkeepers – spares them none out of interest, and only just enough out of self-preservation to be prudent.

It’s the girls who capture the highest and best of her attention, though from afar, always from afar. Her position on the periphery of the Lloyd social structure is ideal for studying the various and sundry ways her classmates doll themselves up to draw the attentions of boys who’d be staring anyway. _What a waste of fucking time._

There’s Susan, with her perfect plaits; Jamie knows she gets up nearly an hour before she would otherwise to brush and smooth and braid and bedeck with ribbons. Jane C., with her eyes always rimmed in a thin ring of kohl, her lips a touch too shiny to be natural, is her form’s primary source for contraband makeup, runs a small black market of lipstick tubes and eyeshadow palettes. And there’s Deborah, who’s perfected the art of wearing her uniform skirts up high enough to raise eyebrows but not quite worthy of a demerit, and whose smirk says she knows that none of the male teachers can even warn her for fear of looking the pervert.

And yet Jamie, plain as she is, outcast as she is, is smart enough to also notice the…less noticeable girls. The girls more interesting to her for all that they _aren’t_ interesting to the Deborahs and Susans and Jane Cs.

There’s Eliza, painfully shy, who has a habit of tonguing the gap between her front teeth; Marianne, teased endlessly by more popular girls for her red hair and her overzealous dedication to her studies – Jamie finds the way she confidently shoots her hand up in class oddly alluring, and the honeyed quality of her voice doesn’t help; Helen and Jane P., nothing special about them except that they’re inseparable friends whose bond Jamie envies only slightly less than the easy way they touch one another, holding hands as they wander across the quad.

There’s also Elaine, whose soft blonde waves and smattering of freckles Jamie made the mistake of noticing entirely too openly last spring. Elaine, who, under the influence of a late night up studying together, huddled over algebra notes and several shared chocolate bars, had leaned forward and brushed her lips against Jamie’s, just once. Elaine, who by the next morning had turned chilly toward Jamie, then by lunchtime was cold with a terror-filled rage, who by nightfall had made sure the entire form knew that Jamie Taylor had cornered her and tried to kiss her in the library, _so watch yourselves, ladies_. 

So, it’s with the utmost of academically detached interest that Jamie watches a new girl emerge from a taxi as the morning is drawing long and the lion’s share of arrivals have already filtered into dorms and old hangouts. Jamie notices the way the girl’s face is shifting between anxiety – because she’s nearly been late? Because she’s new at the school? – and a determined confidence. She notices the girl’s bright, toothy smile as she thanks the taxi driver before turning to wonder up at the façade of the main school building. She notices volumes of blonde hair pulled half-back, the loose part cascading over her shoulders, catching the sunlight in an almost blinding way that Jamie can’t look away from (and if she’s honest, this is what she noticed first, and of course it was – it’s a fucking semaphore and you can bet your bottom dollar that girl knows it).

Jamie sighs. Hair like that, a smile like that, a girl like that – she knows exactly which side of the dividing line between noticeable and not-noticeable she’ll fall on; knows without a doubt that before the week is up this new one will be sitting wedged between Susan and Deborah, batting her eyes at an Andrew or an Ian, who’ll be goggling right back. They’ll be falling over themselves for her. She shakes her head as she slides off the wall at last, trudges toward her dormitory. _Gonna be a fucking gold rush_.

When she re-enters the room she’ll be sleeping and studying in for all of year 11 – Wingrave Hall, second floor – Jamie’s mood goes from sour to downright rotten. First of all, there are entirely too many people inside – at least eight girls are sprawled about, not one, but _two_ of whom are sitting on the bed she’s claimed for herself. She’s just opening her mouth to ask _what the bloody hell is going on_ when she answers her own question: poised at the end of the bed on the far wall is the blonde girl she’d watched arriving. She’s sitting there, shoulders hunched, a little shy, but clinging to the edge of the bed like she…like she belongs there. And then Jamie registers the suitcase open next to her, the way she’s rifling through it with one hand even as she’s entertaining questions from the visitors and _bollocks her luck_ , the blonde girl is her roommate.

-

Danielle is the American’s name. It’s bad enough that she’s pretty, bad enough that she’s new – these two things in tandem would already place her about as high above Jamie in the asinine Lloyd social structure as you can get, but _bloody Christ_ she’s American too and so secures the novelty bit as well.

Danielle is her name, but she goes by Dani, and judging from the way she pushes those two syllables out around her straight, white, American teeth – _Dyeaaa nee_ – she must’ve chosen the nickname just to highlight the accent, force its speaker into a smile, or a grimace at the very least. This is the only fact Jamie knows about Dani, because she’s spent the past three days coming into their shared room as close to lights out as she can, leaving early in the morning to read on her wall before breakfast.

And yet. And yet it’s all she hears in the hallways, all the buzz in the dining room circles around one topic:

“Seen the new lass?”

“The _American_ was just…”

“Did you hear what Dani calls them?!”

“Dani says…” “Dani likes…” “Dani is…”

And she seethes every time.

She’s used to being right about things like this – she can take the temperature of a room in an instant, read an expression in less than, and she can generally predict how a given person is going to react to a given scenario. It’s how she’s made it this far in life relatively unscathed. And yet, each and every time she’s right, she gets no joy from it. More a sick, sinking disappointment that once again, just as she’s predicted, people are exhausting, people are selfish, people are shit to each other.

 _Look at them_ , she thinks now, slouched over her tea, her left foot working at the knee sock that won’t stay in its place on her right calf. The owners of all the voices that have been worming into her head all week long are scrambling to get Dani’s attention at a table across the way. Jane is telling a story so loudly that Jamie can follow the (incredibly thin and yet still almost certainly false) storyline from here. Andrew and Kyle are arm wrestling but keep glancing to see if Dani is paying attention, which, of course she is, because Kyle is leaning back so that he jostles into Dani’s shoulder. _It’s a fucking feeding frenzy._

Dani, for her part, looks…almost as miserable as Jamie feels. Her shoulders are up practically at her ears, and her eyes are bouncing between the others at her table, but don’t stay on anyone for long. In fact, it seems like she’s looking for a way out of the din. Jamie almost pities her. Almost. But then, Deborah taps Dani’s arm, and Dani snaps right back into the conversation, like she’d never been out of it, face suddenly animated with a thousand kilowatt smile, pushing her hair up and off her face just so it can fall right back into place, like each strand has an assigned seat, not overly neat but perfect all the same. Jamie scoffs, rakes a hand through her own ragged curls, shoving them out of her eyes, pushes herself up from the table, disgusted with the lot of them.

-

Jamie again winds her ways through the dormitory hallways two minutes ahead of the prefects coming to do room checks. She removes her shoes in the hallway the better to pad quietly across the wooden floors of her room and straight to her bed, no looking, no talking, no recognition of Dani required. For five nights running, this routine has served its purpose, Dani helping by having already turned off the lights, weighing concern for avoiding demerits above courtesies for roommates. Jamie doesn’t mind, it’s the best of the possible outcomes: she hasn’t had to endure any interaction with the girl at all during their eight hours a day of shared airspace.

Tonight, though, there’s a ribbon of light still glowing under her door. Still, she removes her shoes and turns the knob quietly, prepared to slip in as stealthily as possible.

“Hi Jamie!”

Stealth apparently not required.

“Uh, hi.” Jamie shuffles toward her bed, hesitates when she reaches it: she’s been changing into her pajamas in the dark each night, and the idea of doing so now, with Dani’s attention fully trained on her for some reason, is unsettling. So, she settles on the edge of her bed as she is, stares at Dani, waits for her to speak if she wants to. _May as well get this over with_.

“I’m glad I caught you.”

“Uh, yeah. Bedtime, and all that. Um.” Jamie can feel her face heating with the attention, with a mild annoyed anxiety about whatever the reason may be for this ambush. “Did you need something?”

“I wanted to ask you a question? If that’s okay?”

Jamie flexes her palms against the school-issued blanket, steels herself for the inevitable. No doubt Dani’s new friends have put her up to this. What will it be – _What did your mom charge for a blow job?_ _What’s it like cleaning toilets on the weekends to pay room and board? Is it true you’re a dyke?_

Doesn’t matter. She can take it. She can take one more jeering voice, even if it is attached to those bubblegum lips; one more stare, even if it’s coming from those bright, sparkly eyes. She has an answer ready for whatever this girl’s about to hurl at her, each retort already threaded with enough barbs to ward off future attacks.

She’s armed and waiting, and still, Dani doesn’t speak. _What does she want, an invitation to insult me?_ _Fine._ “What?”

Dani flinches at the tone in her voice, and that’s good – get a little early strike in, never hurt anything.

“I, um, I wanted to ask you about activity days? What do you do for them?”

_Oh. She’s going that route. Easy peasy._

“As I’m sure you’ve already heard,” Jamie starts, and she feels the swagger building behind the words. She’s had a year of practice now letting jabs about her choice of extracurricular – an odd one for girls, to be sure, but also an odd, and unpopular one, generally. “I’m the only student who chooses Horticulture. Yep, it’s just me and Mr. Campbell, all alone out there in the ‘stinking mud.’ And no, he’s not a perve, and no, it’s not work detail I’ve been assigned for being a scholarship kid. Anything _else_ you’d like to know?”

She’s genuinely surprised when the girl responds immediately. Usually, her ability to anticipate the follow-up questions, knock the air out of them before they can even be delivered, deflates the asker as well, at least for a moment.

“I actually _didn’t_ know that,” Dani says, her eyes narrowing slightly. “Is why I _asked_ you. And what I would like to know is why you like it. I don’t know what to pick, so I’ve been asking around to get an idea what they’re all like before I commit to something for the whole year. _If you don’t mind_. If not, don’t tell me. I can figure it out on my own.” She shrugs, but doesn’t break eye contact, those ice blue gems boring into Jamie not out of malice, she thinks, but something more like determination.

 _Huh._ Possibly, _possibly_ this is a question asked of genuine concern, not some hazing exercise designed by Joann to initiate Dani and torture Jamie in one deft swoop.

With this dawning understanding, she’s just about to answer when the door handle jolts and the face of Tabitha, their prefect, materializes, her expression of motherly concern clashing hard against the braces that glint in the room’s overhead light. “Come on now, lights out, you two. You’ve been doing so well, don’t make me write a no-ote!”

“Yeah, sorry, you got it,” Jamie grumbles, and crosses to turn off the light quickly even while rolling her eyes at Tabitha’s singsong cheerfulness as she threatens her peers with punishments. _Fucking bootlicker._

“Oh geeze, I’m sorry, should I have – ?” Dani’s voice is soft but seems sincere enough. She must really be worried about keeping a clean record. Going for prefect herself? Maybe _that’s_ her deal.

“Nah, don’t worry about her,” Jamie says, dismissive. “Got her head up her own arse so far it’s a wonder she can see the lights at all.”

To her great surprise, Dani _laughs_. No, she _guffaws_. Loud enough that Jamie does genuinely worry for a second that Teachers-Pet-Tabby will come back to chastise them again. She allows herself one small chuckle – she can actually be funny sometimes, can’t she – before shucking off her uniform in the cover of the darkness and pulling on her favorite loose tee shirt and sleep shorts. After she’s in bed and can hear that Tabitha has moved on, she says softly, “Okay, so. D’you really want to know?”

“Yes. Please,” comes the immediate reply.

“I like Horticulture for a few reasons. One, honestly, because I get to wear trousers, and my own clothes. Get out of that bloody uniform early three afternoons a week. Two, Campbell is actually very easy-going, unlike most of the self-righteous bastards at this school.”

And here she hesitates for a moment, briefly considers telling Dani the truth – that she loves her time in the greenhouse and the grounds because it’s the opposite of what her da does, trapped underground with the dead and dark, and she’s seen what that does to a person. That it’s something she has a prayer of turning into some kind of living after she graduates, since she’s got no chance of uni, won’t dare push her luck after landing an education here god-knows-how. It shocks her, actually, how close she comes to telling this girl who’s quite likely still going to run back to the inner circle and report all Jamie’s said to her, something true about herself. _Near miss, Jamie. Need to watch that._

“And three, I like it _because_ I’m the only one who picks it. Maybe you’ve noticed, but I’m not exactly a social butterfly – ” she hears a quiet giggle from Dani, but it doesn’t sound derisive, so she finishes, “and it’s nice to get away from all the goddammed _noise_ of this place.” 

Dani waits a moment, perhaps to see if Jamie’s actually finished talking, then says simply, “Thank you for telling me. That does sound nice. Good night, Jamie.” Then all Jamie hears is the rustle of her sliding into her blankets and a soft sigh as she settles into sleep.

_What a fucking weirdo._

-

All the talk about Horticulture has Jamie looking forward to Monday afternoon – the first activities period of the new term – even more than she would be otherwise. She bounds up to her room after her last class of the day, trades her plaid skirt for ripped-knee jeans, her Mary Janes for dusty trainers, and her not-so-pressed-anymore white button-down for her always-soft red plaid. It’s still bloody hot out, still feels like summer, but Campbell insists on covered legs and arms for the work she does, so she diligently unrolls her sleeves, buttons them around her wrists on her way back out the door.

When she arrives at the greenhouse, Campbell gives her a wide smile, a “Welcome back, Taylor,” and a set of pruning shears. A man of few words (just another of his good qualities), he jerks his head in the direction of the rose garden to indicate their work for the afternoon.

Rose duty isn’t Jamie’s favorite. They’re pretentious, persnickety things, roses, little use beyond their looks, bloody gorgeous though they are. She prefers the vegetable gardens and the herbs kept in the greenhouse to supply the school’s kitchen, takes great pride in seeing leaves of rosemary she grew appear on her Sunday roast chicken alongside potatoes she’s nurtured from sprouts. 

But Campbell insists that she undertake a well-rounded survey of all things plant, and in term of job prospects after graduation, high-end landscaping is an absolute must. So, she trudges out to the hedge of roses ahead of her instructor to get started, knows he’ll catch up soon and get back to his unobstructive methods: working quietly alongside Jamie until she has a question, or he sees something that needs correcting or an opportunity to further her instruction in some important way.

She’s well underway removing dead flowers with the shears, tossing each one into a pile in the middle of the courtyard to clean up afterward, when movement in her peripheral vision brings her head up from her work. She means to greet Campbell again, ask how the vegetable gardens have weathered the summer, but – that can’t be right – there are not one, but two figures approaching.

She blinks hard, hopes the heat of the day and the sweat already dripping into her eyes are playing tricks, but alas. Walking next to Campbell, toting gloves and shears and carrying on a chipper conversation, is a particular perky, pretty, American blonde. Fucking hell.

“Taylor, Clayton – Clayton, Taylor.” Campbell says by way of introduction, as though the utter doubling of his activity period size is nothing notable whatsoever.

“Yeah, we’ve met,” Jamie grunts, moves her eyes sharply back to the hedge and snips off another rose head with more force than necessary.

“Ah, good, then you can show her the ropes,” the instructor says, and drifts off to the other side of the hedge, leaving Jamie to do his goddamned job for him. She brusquely tells Dani what she’s doing, shows her once how to know which flowers are ready for removal and where to make the snip, then moves abruptly down the line and away from her.

Dani follows, oblivious, snips a few heads and tosses them into the pile. “I’m so glad you told me about this,” she says, smiling over at Jamie. “The ‘goddammed noise’ of this place was getting to me too. Plus, the pants – er – trousers.” She waves a gloved hand down to indicate her pastel chinos. “That was a draw.”

Goddammit. God damn. Jamie has gone and advertised her way out of the one source of peace and quiet she had here. Serves her right for letting her guard down for batted eyelashes and sweet talk. _Oldest trick in the book and you fell for it. Serves you right._

She huffs in response, and pointedly marches to the other side of the hedge to work in solitude.

-

On Wednesday afternoon Dani’s there again, and with what Jamie has realized is her particular brand of gusto, she digs right in – quite literally – to the work of planting the fall vegetables. She meticulously pokes holes the correct distance apart for runner beans and acorn squash while nattering on about her favorite foods, how beautiful the grounds are, and any number of other goddammed things.

Jamie sneers inwardly when she notices the knees of Dani’s pink trousers are muddied from the work; _see how long she lasts once the wardrobe takes a hit_. But Dani doesn’t complain, just dusts herself off – a futile yet cheerful little clap against her thighs – and asks, “What’s next?” over and over until the period ends.

By Friday Jamie has moved into the acceptance stage. Her days of one-to-one tutelage under Campbell are gone. And yet, it’s not so bad. Dani has calmed down a bit, is settling into the work better than Jamie would ever have thought, isn’t talking so bloody much about things not related to the soil, the water, the growing things they’re tending. She’s not half bad at the work, either, and makes up for her inexperience with careful attention and a willingness to keep trying until she gets it right that Jamie can appreciate, if grudgingly so. Regardless, by the time the weekend rolls around, she’s itching for some time to herself. As they wash off the tools from their last task of Friday afternoon, Jamie is fantasizing about making an early morning of it tomorrow, trooping into the woods at the edge of the grounds with a blanket and a book and not coming back until teatime.

-

However, Saturday morning dawns rainy and grey, as it often does here at fair old Lloyd, but Jamie doesn’t take it too hard. A good soaking will save her and Campbell – and Dani, she adds grudgingly – a lot of time on watering this week, so they can get to more interesting tasks. As she makes her way through her fry-up, hunched over the food like a lion on the defensive, she’s rearranging her plans for the day to accommodate the wet weather.

Dani will be off with her new friends, cavorting in one of the common rooms or watching the boys play indoor football in the gym. While Jamie personally thinks that being pummeled by the tang of sweat and the squeak of rubber-soled shoes on hardwood is likely what it’s like in the sixth circle of hell, it seems to be an activity of choice for much of her cohort on days such as this. With her roommate so conveniently occupied, she’ll have the room to herself, can hunker down there to finish her current novel, get ahead on her homework for the week, maybe even crack open her oft-neglected journal for a little self-reflection to the tune of rain on the windowpanes.

And so, imagine Jamie’s surprise when she returns from breakfast, dripping from the rainy sprint across the quad, to find not a gloriously empty room but one full, just _full to the fucking brim_ , of Dani Clayton. The vision Jamie had been carefully crafting – a day of peace tucked away on her own – shatters at the sight of Dani, purple sweatshirt and golden hair bunched in a bun, looking terribly settled already in the bed opposite hers. 

“Hey,” Dani smiles a dreamy smile at Jamie, who can’t seem to wipe the shocked and disgusted look off her face but doesn’t really care.

“Hi,” she fairly barks back, and squelches across the room, busies herself finding dry clothes and a towel, stomps off still in her wet socks to the bathroom down the hall for a hot shower and yet _another_ reset on her plans. Yet, standing under the scalding spray, she can’t come up with a good alternative, can’t think of another place she can go to get away from everyone. The library is the best option, but today it’ll be teeming with horny hormonal couples who have the highly original idea of going there for some privacy. Ugh. She’ll have to stay in her room, and just, _try_ to get the point across that she’s not there to socialize, that in fact, she wishes, and will therefore pretend, that Dani isn’t there at all.

Part one of this plan is being fully dressed before she gets back to the room – she wants to be able to enter, settle in, and get to her own activities without speaking, and somehow that seems more likely if she doesn’t waste time changing in Dani’s presence, making herself a target for idle conversation while she dresses.

When she gets back to the room and strides across the floor, it seems her plan is working. Dani glances up and smiles at her as she enters, but says nothing, just changes her own position to be more comfortable and gets back to the book in her hands. Good. Fine. Perfect. Jamie can get right on with ignoring her. 

Two hours pass this way: Jamie under her blankets, alternately propped on pillows against the headboard devouring her book and lying on her stomach, chin on one arm, journaling and sketching in the wavery light coming through rain-streaked glass. She even dozes off a time or two to the sound of the rain and Dani’s turning of pages from her side of the room, the sound of Dani’s breath hitching softly when apparently her book takes a surprising turn. Dani’s quite an animated reader – her eyebrows scrunch and raise alternately, her mouth spreads into genuine smiles and frowns as she reads – and Jamie makes a mental note to ask what book she’s reading so that she can check it out for herself. 

The morning’s bubble is broken only by a loud knock at the door – _which is bloody useless if you don’t wait for an answer before barging in_ – but that’s what Kyle does anyway, of course.

“Hey Dani, wanna come to the library? A bunch of us are gonna play hide and seek!”

Jamie huffs at the intrusion, scoffs at the invitation – _not what the library’s fucking for_ – and rolls her eyes at the fact that Kyle doesn’t address or even acknowledge her at all. But she smiles just the tiniest smile, hidden behind the top of her book, at Dani’s response: without hesitation, she says, “No thanks – have fun though,” and lowers her eyes back to her own novel before Kyle’s even left. _Interesting._

When lunchtime rolls around, she reluctantly rolls over, hungrier than she thought she’d be, and starts the process of accepting she’s going to have to go back outside. She pouts to herself, chastises herself silently for a plan poorly executed – in her original dream Saturday, she’d have taken food from the dining hall to pack off into the woods, but the same had slipped her mind this morning in her rush to get in out of the rain.

Apparently, Dani’s having similar thoughts, because she’s got her feet on the floor, is fishing around under her bed for shoes. Jamie supposes they could walk to lunch together – couldn’t hurt, and this could be a good time to to ask about the book, which really must be good: Dani’s been so absorbed in it that she’s made her way through over half of it in the space of the morning.

But instead of the invitation Jamie expects, Dani instead asks, “Want me to bring you a sandwich?” as she’s pulling on a rain jacket.

“Oh, I, er – thought I’d go get something too?” Jamie stammers, and she feels her face flush what she knows is a terrible tomato red, mortified at being caught so tongue tied.

“Okay, just – you look so comfy over there, and I know you’re writing, so I thought I’d save you the interruption. If you want,” Dani adds.

 _Huh._ “Actually, yeah, that would be, wow, that would be perfect,” she admits. Dani’s already half out the door, anyway, she shouldn’t hold her up by insisting she get into rain gear as well.

“See you in, what, an hour?” She figures for the price of not going out in the rain, she can wait while Dani has lunch with her friends, then brings Jamie back one of the sack lunches made available on weekends.

“No, um, I was actually gonna bring mine back and have it with you, if that’s all right?” Dani says with a small question, a small uncertainty, in her eyes. 

“Oh, yeah, of course,” Jamie says. “I mean, ‘s your room too, y’know. Don’t have to ask.” She pauses for a beat, then adds – “But yeah, I’d like that.” 

Dani flashes a high-beamed smile back. “Perfect. Back in a flash.” And she’s gone, leaving Jamie sitting on the edge of her bed wondering how and why she’s suddenly so sweaty in the perfectly temperate room.

She’s got it under control by the time Dani gets back holding two brown paper sacks and two bottles of pop. She gratefully accepts one of each and stops Dani when she starts to move to her own side of the room: “Sit here. ‘S nice by the window.”

And so they share their first meal sitting cross legged on opposite ends of Jamie’s bed, Jamie balancing their drinks on the windowsill, Dani going giggly when Jamie realizes she’s dropped a crust onto the blankets and grumbles at herself as she frantically tries to sweep out the crumbs.

Jamie does get to ask about Dani’s book, and they spend most of the hour comparing favorites. Jamie teases Dani for her enduring love of Nancy Drew – _What? She’s a heroine, Jamie. There’s no age limit on a strong female protagonist._ – and Dani laughs skeptically at Jamie’s insistence that even if she doesn’t usually like sci-fi, she’d appreciate Dune – _It’s a classic. Timeless. C’mon._

“That’s exactly what Eddie said,” Dani muses, and her laughter trails off a bit, eyes falling.

“Who’s Eddie? I don’t exactly keep tabs on all the boychildren at this school, but I don’t remember an Eddie,” Jamie says.

“Oh, he’s not. He’s from back home,” Dani explains, and it seems like she’s treading carefully around something here. “He was…he used to be my best friend.” Jamie takes note of the _used to be_ , but also of how Dani’s eyes haven’t moved from the floor since she first said this bloke’s name, so she waits, doesn’t press. They’ve only just met, really, who is she to push Dani into talking about something she doesn’t want to?

Dani continues – as most people will, if you give them the time and the quiet to do so: “Can’t believe I was best friends with a _boy_ , honestly. But I didn’t really fit in at my old school – even less than I do here” – at this Jamie cocks her head, because what is she on about? She’s easily the most sought-after girl here, could have any friends she wanted, any boy she wanted – “and he was just kind of there. And he was sweet, before we grew up and he became a…testosterone-soaked nightmare.”

Jamie guffaws. “ _That_ is the most accurate description of all the boys in this place that I’ve ever heard,” she says, and she feels her lips curl in disgust. “Can’t believe, honestly, the lengths these girls to go to get their attention. But I’m sorry that happened to you, specifically.”

“Yeah,” Dani says, but it comes out halfhearted, and Jamie wonders if she’s missed the mark. “Anyway,” she continues, straightening her shoulders and giving her head a little shake, “I’ll let you get back to your books and all.” And before Jamie can protest, Dani is up and off her bed, tidying her lunch leavings into the wastebasket, and busying herself on her own side of the room.

-

The afternoon passes much the same way as the morning – beds, books, rain, and a quiet that feels less and less breakable and more and more cozy – except it’s much less peaceful.

Every quarter hour it seems like someone is shouting through their door, if not barging straight in, to invite Dani to go do something. Two girls invite her to the gym – as Jamie had predicted, _Everyone’s hanging out in there, we miss you_ ; but Dani again says a soft but firm _No, thanks_. A boy who’s typically quite shy stops by to ask her if she’d fancy a game of chess, and blushes so hard Jamie nearly feels bad for how much she enjoys watching him get turned down, however gently.

Even fucking Marianne is affected, and pokes her head in the room while pushing her glasses up her nose. “Hey, uh, Dani, wanna come study over in my room for geography on Monday?” she asks quietly in that rich voice of hers. For her, Jamie notes, Dani smiles with genuine kindness, actually seems to consider going for a minute there, then – and maybe she imagines it, but she thinks Dani looks over at _her_ for just a thought before saying “Next time?” and sending Marianne on her nerdy little way.

Though she’s gracious in the face of all these suitors, Jamie now picks up on traces of annoyance on Dani’s face that grow with every interruption: her jaw tightens, her smile is increasingly strained. So when Jane C. bops into the room waving a mascara, shrilling out, “Dani! Makeovers in the common room, come on!” it’s Jamie who jumps out of her bed to see her out. Before she shuts the door behind her, however she shouts into the hall, loud enough, she hopes, to be heard in the common room-turned-beauty-parlour two floors below, “Oi! You lot! Give it up mates! She’s reading!”

She re-enters the room to a grateful, slightly embarrassed look on Dani’s face. She hates the thought that Dani might feel responsible for these cretins’ behavior, now that she knows it’s well and truly un-asked-for, so she says, “Sorry about that. Sometimes my wild popularity starts to affect those around me – have to hire some better bouncers,” and Dani laughs, sighs, and says simply, earnestly, “Thank you.”

Jamie’s admonishment seems to have worked: for a long while, no one comes calling. In fact, they’re preparing to walk to dinner together when there’s a short rap of knuckles on the door. She braces herself for yet another idiotic request that Dani will have to rebuff, or worse, worries that she won’t be able to put them off again, and Jamie herself will end up sharing a table with not only Dani but some of her admirers as well. What comes instead is Tabitha’s voice, businesslike, through the wood: “Dani, there’s a call for you on the hall phone.”

Dani sighs, “That’ll be my mom. You’d better go on to dinner without me – never know when she’ll be in the mood to talk. I’ll catch up.” Jamie is surprised at how deflated she feels at this change of plans – _since when do you need more company than your latest chapter_ – but says “No problem, enjoy your chat,” anyway, retrieves her typical mealtime companion from her desk, and sets off.

Still, though, she’s careful to keep an eye out for Dani over the top of her book all through her bangers and mash and mushy peas. She watches the entrance for Dani’s purple rain slicker, scans the line at the buffet for a rain-darkened shade of blonde.

As the minutes tick by, she finds herself becoming increasingly annoyed at Dani’s absence, finds herself picturing Dani curled around the receiver of the hall phone, relating tales of the week’s adventures to her mom, who’ll be rapt on the other end, praising the high mark Dani earned on the biology test on Tuesday, asking loads of questions about who she’s become friends with, what the school is like.

You can just tell from looking at Dani that she had a solid childhood. It’s written in her full cheeks that haven’t ever missed a meal. In her wardrobe, nothing too flashy but everything up to date and in colors Dani seems to have chosen for herself, no anoraks with sleeves too long or socks with holes darned more than once. It’s in the way she smiles easily, laughs easily, gives kindness easily and expects it in return.

Why wouldn’t someone with such a fairytale of a home life want to skip dinner to hear the delight in her mother’s voice? Jamie doesn’t want to begrudge her this, but she does, and so she’s grumpy all over again by the time she’s finished her plate of food – alone – and returned to their room. Yet, the girl she finds when she opens the door isn’t basking in the glow of parental praise, no; Dani is sitting on the edge of her bed, body stiff and brittle, wheezing as tears streak her flushed cheeks. When Jamie enters the room, her head whips around, eyes wide, like she’s shocked to see Jamie back so soon, and she grimaces through clenched teeth.

Jamie’s reaction is immediate, automatic, the contrast between the expected and the reality knocking her out of her typical care around other people’s emotions. “Dani, what’s wrong? Did something happen at home? Is everyone okay?” Surely what she’s seeing could only mean that someone’s sick, someone’s dead.

Dani laughs mirthlessly, pounds against her thighs with clenched fists. “Oh, everyone’s just fine, just right as rain. Everyone but me.”

Jamie feels her brow furrow, has no idea what Dani could be referring to – she was fine when she left her here. “What do you mean, Dani? Are you all right? Are you feeling sick?”

Dani’s eyes raise, hover on Jamie’s, miserable, glassy with tears. Twice she opens her mouth to speak but stops herself, swallows the words. Each repetition of this pushes Jamie’s concern higher – truly, what on earth has happened in the space of forty minutes that’s affected her roommate this much? Such is Jamie’s worry that she feels herself step closer to Dani, then closer still, until she’s reaching out and putting a hand on Dani’s shoulder. Dani leans into the touch, bends her head to rest against Jamie’s arm. The unspoken ask for affection, the open admission of a need, is so unheard-of in Jamie’s experience of her peers, in Jamie herself, that without really thinking about it she grants herself an instant exception to her own rules about limiting physical contact with other people, and sits down directly next to Dani so she can keep contact with the girl’s shaking shoulder.

“She’s just – fuck – she’s so awful,” Dani sobs out, and Jamie’s confusion deepens.

“Who’s awful now?” Jamie speaks the words softly.

“My mom. She’s – _God_ I wish she’d just stop calling. Or that I could stop running to the phone when she does. But if I don’t – ” and her then her words dissolve, come out in unintelligible globs, her shoulders heaving with every expulsion of desperate, distraught sound. She’s in so much pain that Jamie gives in and wraps her arms all the way around Dani, if only to keep her from falling off the bed with her convulsions. 

She holds Dani as though holding her together, reaches up and smooths her hair and – vaguely aware that she hasn’t comforted anyone like this since she last saw Mikey – finds herself rocking gently and making small shushing noises onto the crown of Dani’s head.

When Dani quiets, Jamie says, calm as she can: “Dani. What’s your ma saying to you? And you’re an ocean apart – why can’t you just tell her you’re busy, ring again later on?”

“Because! Because she’ll bring me back! She’ll bring me back, Jamie, and they’ll make me _go_ , and I can’t – ” and again she’s lost to uncontrollable howls. 

Again, Jamie waits, rocks, shushes, lets Dani ride out the swell of what Jamie now sees isn’t sadness, isn’t anger – it’s _fear_. Whatever contradictory threat she’s facing – bring her back, make her go? – it’s enough that it’s the only thing, come to think of it, that Jamie has seen knock Dani down even for a moment in the time she’s known her.

With this realization, Jamie changes her tack. She loosens her grip on Dani’s shoulders, but keeps contact on her forearms, tugs gently so that Dani faces her again. Dani’s face is blotchy and swollen, and she has trouble keeping her eyes on Jamie’s for more than a few seconds at a time. Embarrassed at having shown so much? Maybe. But still, she’s here, she’s listening, she’s waiting for Jamie to continue. So, shaking her still-damp curls off her forehead, she does.

“Look. You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to, okay? But I know that no one, family or not, should be making you this upset. So if you want to talk about it, I’m here. You’ve probably seen by now, ‘s not like I’m gonna go blabbing to anyone else. And I…I know a thing or two about difficult families.” She grimaces inwardly at this last, didn’t mean to make any of this about her, certainly didn’t mean to reveal anything so tender to this girl, hurting or not.

But the admission seems to have made all the difference to Dani, who now sniffs, looks her square in the eye for a long moment, and says, tentative still but determined: “She. She…sent me here. It wasn’t my choice to leave my friends, my school, everything, and come all the way over here alone. Well, it _was_ my choice, but it was the better of the two options they gave me.”

Jamie nods slowly, because yes, this sounds a bit familiar – she too had faced a choice, had seen Lloyd as the clearly preferable option, had bucked up and launched into a new life on unfamiliar – but to her, not unwelcome – territory.

“Why, Dani? Why would they make you – why would she send you here, if you didn’t want to come? You make good grades, I honestly can’t see you getting into much trouble – ” Dani cuts her off with a scoff.

“ _Really_ ,” Jamie says, half in wonder, half in – she can admit it – _challenge_ to this girl who is positively fastidious in the way she cleans and puts away her horticulture tools, who has a color-coded class schedule that matches her notebooks, who is never, as far as Jamie can tell, so much as late to morning assembly.

“What, did you…” she searches around for a guess that’ll be ridiculous enough to make Dani laugh, “accidentally break a school rule about how many advanced classes you’re permitted to take?” It’s not her best work, but it does the job. Dani laughs – it’s weak but it’s there – and looks over at her again, eyebrows pinched together and mouth small, like she’s trying to decide just how much to tell. And as much as Jamie wants to believe she doesn’t care one way or another, she finds herself really hoping that what her own features reflect back is patient understanding the sort of which will make Dani feel comfortable enough to open up.

“No, no, nothing like that,” Dani finally says. “Nothing at school. I was…I got in trouble with, um. I got caught with someone that I…shouldn’t have been caught with.”

 _Oh. Interesting._ Jamie wouldn’t’ve pegged Dani for the type to sneak around with boys, especially not the type to get caught. She’s careful not to let too much surprise show on her face, though, as she replays Dani’s words in her head, notes that she’d been careful to say _someone that I shouldn’t have been caught with_ rather than _shouldn’t have been with_. In love, then? Ill-fated romance? She could see that for this sweet, naïve, (seemingly) innocent fresh-faced girl.

Or maybe even less innocent than she’d expected, for she’d also said, at first, _I got in trouble with_ – “Dani, did you – you weren’t – did he knock you up?” Jamie feels a flurry of emotion at the very idea, one, of Dani writhing underneath some boy – was it that Ed that she’d mentioned? – and two, of the trauma of _taking care of it_ – for she’d had to have ended the pregnancy, right? To be here for a school year? Her mind is mid-tizzy when Dani’s short laugh breaks through her thoughts again.

“No. Very much no.” She sighs, looks at Jamie again like she’s sizing her up, deciding whether to spill the whole story. Or like she’s begging Jamie to fill in the rest herself, but how can she with so little to go on?

“Oh, um, that’s good then.” Jamie feels that she should say something else, but she’s at a loss. So she pivots. She knows that when someone’s this upset it’s best to keep them talking about the facts – it makes them go logical then rather than emotional, and you get more information about the situation as well. She’s mining her brain for what else to prompt Dani with when she remembers another nugget from the girl’s teary outcry: she’d had a choice.

“Dani, you said you had two options after – after whatever happened, happened. What was the other option, the one you didn’t choose?”

Dani takes a deep breath, and Jamie can see that she’s building the last of the courage she needs to tell the whole story. A part of her wants to feel disappointed that once again, she’s correctly broken a person down to the individual levers and knobs that control them, has cracked the code of a girl she barely knows. But what she feels instead is relieved that Dani seems comfortable enough to open up to her, that Dani might herself get a bit of respite from the suffering that she’s apparently borne silently this whole time.

“A…another type of school, closer to home. The kind they sent—” another sharp intake of breath – “Betty to. After. She…she didn’t get a choice.” Jamie had expected a long story following such build up, and so she’s caught off-guard, suspended in the air, feet still running for a few seconds before she crashes down onto the meaning of what Dani’s said in so few words. _Betty_. _She_. _After_.

“She – you were with _Betty_ and –” Jamie’s struggling to keep up her end of the conversation, head still reeling.

“And we got caught. In her bed. One afternoon. Betty’s mom walked in.” Dani fills in the details with soldierlike efficiency, nodding in time with her words. “My mom was there before I even got downstairs. The preacher got involved, he – he was the one who suggested the other school. Said they could cure it, takes just a couple of years of intensive…” she trails off and tears up, and Jamie very nearly does as well: she’s heard about places like this.

“So they told me,” Dani continues through the welling in her eyes, apparently determined to tell the entire tale now she’s begun it, “they told me I could go to one like that – not the same one they sent her to, obviously. I don’t think I’ll ever see her again – but a school like that, or a school over here. And a cousin of a family friend told my mom about Lloyd – everybody got involved, one way or another – and so that was the choice. And of course I chose this. But there are rules. I have to talk to my mom whenever she calls, answer her questions, _tell her things_ as she says – _Mother-daughter things, normal things for normal girls, Danielle_ ,” and the vitriol in Dani’s voice when she mimics her mother would tell Jamie everything she couldn’t’ve guessed an hour ago had she heard it then.

“I write to her once a week too. My grades have to stay up. But no…no therapy, no praying, no…any of the hell I know Betty’s going through. I honestly think my mom just wanted me out of sight and out of mind, by which she means out of the minds of the other bridge ladies.” Dani shrugs, resigns, and Jamie’s heart breaks for her. “Anyway, there it is. That’s why _the American_ is really here.”

She looks up at Jamie again at last, and Jamie realizes that her expression has melted from fear into worry, and from worry now into a sinking tiredness that Jamie feels in her very marrow. For it’s a feeling she knows all too well herself – _There, I couldn’t hide it anymore; you’ve seen how ugly it all is, how unworthy I am. Do what you will with me. I’m done._

She’ll later think it’s because of this – the surprise of seeing herself, the weight of her own pain-turned-exhaustion, echoed so nearly in the mirror of this other person – that she chooses her next words so much less carefully than she ought.

“Yeah, er, no, won’t tell anyone.” _They wouldn’t believe me, anyway._ “I got sent here too, you know. Different reasons, tell you those some other day—” _Jamie, what are you saying to this girl?_ – “and there was no threat of a place like _that_ , though, between you and me” – _seriously Jamie, stop talking_ – “there could have been.” 

Dani’s eyes widen, but her lips turn up at the corners in a small smile that tells Jamie that, despite the blare of the alarms her better self is still ringing, she is as safe here as she was before. What’s more unexpected is what Dani says, in a voice that sounds…sweet? Curious? Jamie can’t exactly place it, but she doesn’t think it matches the words that come out: “I thought, um, I thought maybe?”

Jamie feels her shoulders widen on the defensive. “Oh? Did someone say something to you? Try to warn you off the dyke on the second floor?” Dani winces at the word, shakes her head.

“No, they actually didn’t. Just, um, a lot of what you do feels…familiar. You don’t chase after boys, that’s obvious, but you also notice what chasing after boys, well, what it costs other girls. It makes you mad – in the same way it makes me mad. If that makes any sense at all.”

Jamie feels herself nodding, slowly, wants to say something to the effect of _Yeah, that makes a lot of sense actually,_ but can’t seem to say anything while she’s trying desperately to figure out when and how Dani got such an accurate read of her.

“Oh, and your clothes,” Dani adds with a smile, more relaxed, that shows her teeth and a hint of the dimples that frame her mouth like parentheses. 

Jamie’s mouth falls open – _the cheek of her_ – and gestures with a hand at her side of the room where several articles of clothing – her cutoffs, multiple pairs of trousers ripped at the knees and stained with mud from the gardens, her red flannel and her blue one, a number of band tees from concerts she’s never seen, collected meticulously at second-hand shops – are scrunched on the top of her dresser, splayed on her bedspread, draped across the chair of her desk. “What d’you mean?”

She can’t keep up the ruse any longer than it takes to get the faux-affronted words out, though, and she’s laughing before Dani can even come up with a reply.

“Yeah, reckon I don’t care too much to try and fit in,” she admits. “Mostly just stay out of everyone’s way, keep to myself.” _Till you came along_ , she doesn’t add. She does say, by way of fully equalizing the conversation – _in for a penny, in for a pound_ – “Best way to keep ‘em off me. Learned that the hard way,” and briefly recounts the disaster with Elaine last fall.

When she’s finished, Dani’s eyes are all concern and sympathy, like she hasn’t just confessed that the girl she was with – _the girl she loved?_ – got sent away to be prodded on by priests. “I’m so sorry that happened to you, Jamie. It shouldn’t have.”

“Yeah,” is all Jamie can say. “You too. Shouldn’t’ve happened either. Not at all.”

And with that, an understanding takes root between them. Or maybe it had already rooted, and this is the moment it starts to bloom. Jamie’s not sure exactly what the proper metaphor would be, honestly. Jamie’s sure of less and less these days.

-

The weather for the next two weeks is no more accommodating to outdoor plans. While Jamie knows intellectually that this is perfectly typical for Lloyd, she also strongly suspects that it’s a punishment sent to torment her specifically. Because what it definitely means is that she now spends large swaths of her days with Dani at a closer distance than ever, working next to her in the greenhouse, hips bumping – _accidentally?_ – as they repot seedlings; or reading across the room from her before lights out, which is now accompanied nightly by a small _Night, Jamie_ as Dani nestles into her pillow.

And when she isn’t actually sharing space with the girl, she’s anticipating the next time it will happen. Specifically, she’s anticipating, with dread, the way that when Dani walks into a room that Jamie occupies, Jamie’s body runs to its basest instincts: her face heats, her throat goes dry, and she begins sweating as though she’s trapped in the greenhouse in July. This is the hell she’s trapped in now – for it is _new_ , right? Something about the revelations of that rainy weekend must’ve done it: loosed the floodgates of teenagerdom from where she keeps them sensibly locked away and _Jesus, Jamie, get it together. Just because you like girls and she likes girls doesn’t call for all of this. Have a little dignity for yourself, a little respect for Dani. You don’t even know her._

Beyond the inconvenience and discomfort of these things, she is deeply chagrined to learn that she is no more able than her peers to control the bodily manifestations of her out-of-control hormones. Well, at least she doesn’t have to be a slave to impulse like the rest of them are. While she can’t seem to stop what she feels, she focuses on the things she can control.

She can, for example, ensure that she’s well engrossed in her homework at her desk, back facing the door to hide any embarrassing and inappropriate reactions to Dani returning to their room. She can dawdle on her way to Horticulture, give herself time to scope out where Dani’s working so that she can pause at a respectful distance, let the waves of – whatever the fuck this is – wash over her before making a more dignified entrance. She can choose to wear dark tee shirts to hide the fact that she’s been sweating through them at the mere sight of – _No. Enough. Don’t picture her here, concentrate on Algebra for fucks sake._

But for all the effort Jamie puts into managing herself around Dani – the constant monitoring of her time, space, and wardrobe choices occupies quite a bit of headspace – she refuses to admit defeat by avoiding the girl. She’s her roommate after all, and, Jamie can admit it: against her better judgement, they’re becoming friends. Maybe already are.

They’ve certainly taken to sitting together at meals more often than not, have even staked a claim on a table that increasingly feels like _theirs_. It’s off to one side of the hustle and bustle of the dining hall, close to to the large bank of south-facing windows. It affords a good view of the grounds as well as the tableau of high school drama that plays out morning, noon, and night, but is removed enough that they can stay out of the more treacherous currents.

It’s from this table that Dani and Jamie watch the storm arrive.

As they sit down with their plates piled high with roast beef, Yorkshire puddings, stuffing, and gravy, the hue of the world outside tilts suddenly into a murky grey. The light inside shifts as well, the yellow of the lamps on the tables doing more work than they normally would this time of day, but other than that, life goes on. At some point in the meal it begins to rain, but Jamie can’t really say when – it’s been such a constant this term it feels it never really lets up.

Jamie is using a pudding to sop up a last bit of mint sauce when the rain becomes harder, hard enough to snap them out of the conversation they’re having about _Dune_ – for Dani has given in and is halfway through already, and for all her complaints about too many characters seems awfully keen to compare notes on the plot at every turn – to look outside. The rain is lashing against the panes with a fury, the tree branches across the yard waving frantically as though hoping to flag down a rescue.

Dani shoots a concerned look at Jamie, asks if she thinks the spindly apple trees they’ve been tending in the orchard can survive this. Jamie is just about to say that she thinks they will, hopes so at least, when the pattering on the windows morphs into more of a tapping, then quickly to an aggressive rapping: hail. With it comes lightning, an incandescent dagger splitting the sky nearly simultaneously with a stomach-dropping cannon-call of thunder.

The whole show is so loud that their conversation is necessarily suspended, but Jamie finds Dani’s eyes in the din, raises her eyebrows and frowns: _Wow._

Jamie gets to see about a nanosecond of Dani’s smile in return before the lights go out. As they’re plunged into darkness, another sound joins the cacophony of the storm: in the time honored tradition of schoolchildren everywhere, about half the hall is screaming bloody murder at the loss of electricity. Jamie rolls her eyes – _grow up, guys_ – even as she nudges her chair closer to Dani’s, feeling the need to make up for her loss of visual by closing the gap between them until she can sense Dani’s warmth, her breath, inches away.

The shouts have barely died down before two of the teachers on duty have retrieved torches from someplace and are scanning them across the hall, as though making sure no one’s disappeared.

“All right, all right, let’s calm down shall we,” one of them is shouting above the titters and whispers that dance around the room. “I’m sure the electricity will be restored soon. Until then – ” but she is interrupted by the crash and crackle of glass shattering as a branch sails in through the window not two meters from Jamie’s head, lands on the parquet in glittering relief in the next flash of lighting.

Jamie freezes, grabs for and instinctively latches onto Dani’s arm, the sound of glass breaking across a hard floor ripping her out of Lloyd and into memories of the narrow miss of a hurled ashtray, of whisking Mikey out of the room before the shards of crystal or the residuals of the fight could embed in his tender toddler self, of cleaning up the wreckage the next morning, the only one awake to witness the pathetic remnants of another useless rage.

Her flashback is interrupted – thankfully so – by the clarion voice of the teacher above the clamor: “Change of plans. All students please gather with your prefects and prepare to return to your dormitories. Everyone will shelter in the common rooms until further notice. Each common room is stocked with emergency lights and first aid supplies if needed. No one is to leave the group for any reason.”

There’s a swarm of activity then that Jamie half-remembers: Dani clasps one of her own hands over Jamie’s around her bicep, places the other one on the small of Jamie’s back, and shepherds her toward where Tabitha is wailing out _Wingrave Hall second floor, over here please!_ By the time everyone is roughly assembled at the exits, the hail has stopped, and when the rain breaks for a moment, they run in groups through the torrent to their respective dormitories.

Through all this, Dani maintains her grip on Jamie’s hand; even when Jamie stumbles in a slick of mud and falters for a moment, losing her grip on Dani’s arm, she feels Dani’s fingers intertwined with hers, is able to keep running after her, the flash of blonde a beacon leading her to safety. 

By the time they tumble into Wingrave Hall, the shock of the rain and the exhiliaration of the dash has brought Jamie back into herself enough that she finds herself laughing along with her classmates, and in particular, along with Dani, whose shoulder is pressed into hers. They stand like shaggy dogs, gasping and giggling and shaking the water from their hair, until Tabitha herds them toward the common room.

As promised, oil lamps are brought out and lit, and everyone gathers naturally around the halo of light they cast in the center of the otherwise quite dark room. People sit in a rough circle, irrespective of where the armchairs and sofas fall, looking around at each other with the wonder of people who have survived a minor ordeal together.

Jamie’s feeling that maybe she could be at peace with her peer group lasts about five minutes, and is immediately dispelled when someone across the way suggests they play truth or dare.

“No way,” she says, shaking her head and gathering her feet beneath her, “I’m going to go find a book.” But this time the hand that reaches out is Dani’s, and it lands on Jamie’s wrist before she can rise, is accompanied by a pleading look and a soft voice.

“No, don’t. Please – we’re supposed to stay with the group. Plus, it’s dumb, I know, but it could be kinda funny.” Dani says this last with a one-shouldered shrug, like she’s embarrassed to suggest it but hopes she’s right.

Jamie knows in her bones that this optimism is misplaced, but reluctantly agrees to stay – _too fucking dark to read anyway_ – and settles back in on the carpet next to Dani as the game gets underway.

She’s pretty sure that the rules of Truth or Dare say that the last person to go gets to assign the task for the next one, but of fucking course that’s not how it’s being played tonight. No, Joann and her minions have appointed themselves the Parliament of the Pointless or some shit and are doling out all of the dares and questions themselves. _Whatever_. Jamie is just passing the time here anyway.

Andrew – _dare_ – moons the group for ten whole seconds. _Gross_.

Joann – _truth_ – What base have you gotten to? _Third_. Titters and giggles and Jamie’s rolled eyes. _Get a life._

Eliza – _truth_ – Do you think Mr. Simmons is hot? _Yeah, of course._ Jamie’s about to combust.

But next up is Dani, who squares her shoulders and bucks the gendered trend, proclaims _dare_ , and sits tall to await her fate, assigned by the giggling ringleaders again huddled together cooking up some asinine task. Their heads part, and Joann herself, with a self-satisfied smirk, says, “I dare you to kiss Ian. With tongue.”

Dani’s eyes flash to Ian, then to Jamie, flinging flecks of candlelight, sparks into Jamie’s eyes. She keeps her eyes on Jamie’s as she says, “No.”

“What do you mean _no_?” Joann says. “You asked for a dare, and that’s the dare. Now do it.”

“Yeah, now you have to _do it_ , with me,” Ian says, and he’s already crawling across the circle toward Dani, licking his disgusting lips.

“No,” Dani says again, firmer, even as she’s leaning back away from his path. “I take it back. Truth.” 

“No takebacks,” Jane says.

“Yeah, no takebacks,” Susan joins in, and soon there are voices coming in a cacophony from around the circle: “Come on, you can’t be that innocent.” “Just a little tongue. Just so we can see.” “You can’t keep leading them all on, Dani, Jesus, just pick one and date him.” “Yeah, and make it me!” This last from Ian, who’s advanced again, is crouched just in front of Dani, who has moved back as far as physically possible, is now pressed up against the wall nearly outside the circle of light.

Jamie watches all this – it only takes a matter of seconds for the wolfpack to turn – with an intense fearstruck frozenness. The words to back Dani up, tell them to fuck off, are struggling to fight their way to the top lungs gone breathless. The order to move her arm, move her body, block Dani – _protect Dani for fucks sake_ – is stuck between her brain and muscles gone rigid out of practice, out of the near-daily training of her youth to be invisible, be silent, be still and you won’t get hurt.

Still, she’s almost there, can almost force a cry out of her mouth, when Dani stops retreating and does it herself: In one quick motion she stands and pushes Ian back and onto his rear with one firm hand to his chest, says “I’m out. This is stupid.” Then she turns on her heel and disappears through the heavy wooden common room doors.

No one moves. Jamie glares around at each of the faces in the circle, their expressions ranging from amusement to shock that Dani – that anyone – would stand up to Joann and company.

“Seriously?” Jamie says. This – the one time Dani needs someone – is the one time no one’s going to pursue Dani? “Fuck this and fuck all of you.” And she too pushes herself to her feet, doesn’t give them another look or another word as she rushes after her friend.

The hallway is pure obsidian after the door clicks shut behind her.

“Dani?” she whispers into the black. “Dani, where are you? It’s me, it’s Jamie.”

She hears a sniff from no more than four feet away – thank fuck she hasn’t got far, or Jamie’d never find her in this darkness.

“Dani, are you all right? That was seriously fucked in there. Stupid idiots, who do they think they are?” Dani is silent, so Jamie continues: “But Jesus, that was amazing, too. Think Joann’s still trying to scrape her jaw up off the floor.”

Dani’s sniff turns to a snort of derisive laughter, and Jamie smiles to herself. _There we are._

“I’m…I’m not going back in there,” comes Dani’s voice, and it’s small but it’s sure, and Jamie beams with pride.

“Of course not. Me either.” Jamie whispers the words, lest a teacher or prefect follow them, catch them, drag them back to the teenage hell that is the common room. “Let’s go back to our room. If Tabitha or anyone fusses, we’ll tell them I didn’t feel well or some – ”

“I don’t care.” Dani’s voice, stronger now, is also closer, and Jamie feels a warm hand close around her elbow. “I seriously do not care what any of them think. Let’s get out of here.”

In the dark, Jamie’s eyebrows raise, as does her assessment of Dani – again.

They feel their way quietly down the hallway, make a left and stumble into the bottom stair, hands linked out of necessity. They work their way up the wooden staircase one after another, left hands on the rail, right hands intertwined. At the second floor, Jamie sighs in relief, confident now that no one’s coming after them. Just as she’s about to say as much to Dani, her hip smashes into something hard and sharp.

“Fuck! Fuckfuckfuckfuck,” she growls, stopping short with the shock and pain.

“Oomph! Sorry!” Dani, in turn, walks right into Jamie’s back, a clumsy domino effect that knocks Jamie forward again, though thankfully she misses the table this time, lurches forward into what must be the middle of the hallway. She nearly falls, is ready to accept that as her fate, when she feels a strong hand around her hip, feels Dani step behind her and catch her around the waist, steadying them both.

Jamie suddenly gets a flash of what the whole sequence would have looked like, had anyone the ability to see it. The visual is so ridiculous that a laugh bubbles up in spite of the pain when she feels herself being moved again, thinks Dani is having a laugh along the same lines – what clumsy fuckers they are. She lets Dani push her backward playfully until her rear lands on the same blessed table, but softly this time, Dani’s hands still placed at her hips, and she’s just starting to chuckle aloud when the sound is stopped by Dani’s mouth pressed to hers.

She thinks it must be an accident, a movement misplaced by flying blind, and she freezes so as not to overstep, the halted laugh like glass in her throat.

But Dani is still moving, moving with purpose: Dani is moving her lips against Jamie’s so that they open; is moving her hands to Jamie’s forearms and tugging so that Jamie’s hands find Dani’s back and hip, reflexively pull her in closer; is moving her tongue gentle but sure across Jamie’s lower lip.

And now Jamie finds herself giving as good as she gets, finds her body knows exactly what it wants to do in this scenario. Her hand knows the path it wants to take up Dani’s back to the nape of her neck to bury fingers in her ponytail. Her tongue knows the rhythm with which it wants to play against Dani’s, inviting her in deeper when a moan vibrates joined lips. Her legs know just how they want to part to make room for Dani step in closer, welcome the way Dani’s hips roll into hers. 

When Dani’s pushing her nearly up and onto the table, Jamie realizes that while the chances of someone coming along are low, they aren’t zero, says, “Come on. Our room.” Hands find hands, temporarily leaving collarbones and thighs wanting, and they travel the last thirty meters to their door as fast as two people moving in sheer darkness can.

They tumble into the room and onto Dani’s bed – it’s closer – and find each other again, pick up where they’d been forced to leave off. The opacity of the black and the din of the storm still raging against the window makes Jamie feel like she’s in a literal bubble with Dani, untouchable by anyone else but able to do nothing but with each other.

She finds herself working down a list of places on Dani she’s wanted to touch for weeks – this list having materialized from nowhere, but clear and insistent all the same: she walks her fingers across Dani’s shoulders, runs a thumb up the column of her neck. She buries her hands in Dani’s hair over and over, gripping and grasping in time with Dani’s kisses. She arches up into Dani’s chest as Dani moves against her, splays a hand across Dani’s back under her shirt, palm resting on her spine. 

She finds herself cataloguing the small noises – whimpers and gasps and hums – that Dani makes, delighting in each new one, learning how to elicit them, how to deepen them. She hears herself respond in kind, can’t control in particular the whine that comes out when Dani drifts her fingers under her shirt and traces the edges of her bra.

And then she finds herself again having one hand taken in Dani’s. From her position straddling Jamie’s hips, Dani is pulling Jamie’s hand to the front of her own trousers, places it there against the zipper, rocks down to meet it. Jamie grins because, _Wow, American girls_ , and allows herself just one moment to presses against the seam – _not the first night, not like this_ – before sliding her palm up and returning to her explorations of Dani’s breasts over the satin cups of her bra, content to get to know Dani’s body one part at a time, to savor this surprise as long as she can.

Dani whines at the loss, seems to think maybe Jamie just didn’t understand the clear-as-day invitation, because she takes matters into her own hands: Jamie can hear her fumbling with the button on her own jeans with one hand, can feel the rushed jostling in Dani’s upper body.

“Dani, wait, stop,” Jamie says, gentle but firm, leaning back, halting their kiss.

“What, why?” Dani’s searching for Jamie’s mouth, eager to reconnect – she runs her hands up Jamie’s arms to her neck, her face, to guide her back in, presses down onto Jamie as if to show means it.

“Because you’ve been upset, and this is – this is a lot.” Jamie withdraws her own hands from Dani’s shirt to set a good example. She wants this, wants it badly, so badly only one counterweight stills her hand: the prospect of something longer, something deeper, something more meaningful with Dani than a hookup tinged with angry revenge at useless teenage boys. No, when this happens, if this happens, she wants all of Dani to herself.

“Oh shit. Shit. I took it too far, you don’t want to – ”

“No, I want to,” Jamie laughs soundlessly, _like I need to tell you that,_ “but not like this – not when you’re angry at Ian and the rest of those idiots. The last thing I want is for you to do something – or for me to do something – you’ll regret later.”

Her heart is pounding, and she’s honestly not sure whether it’s for what she’s already done or what she’s denying herself now. Or maybe it’s because of what she’s about to say. “Because I like you. A lot. And I don’t want to fuck it up, moving too fast.”

There’s a pause, and Jamie holds her breath, praying to some unnamed force that her words land the way she means them, that she hasn’t offended Dani, that she hasn’t said or done too little or too much, that this is something real and worth pursuing and not a one-off, weird night that will break this still-fragile thing that’s been building around them.

When she hears Dani sigh, “Yeah, okay. You’re right,” Jamie thinks it’s close enough, close enough to all right, but still she feels pulled to add: “There are other nights. And there will _be_ other nights,” smiling around what’s essentially a promise to do this, and more, again. And bloody soon, she hopes.

“You promise?” The words come out as a plea, and Jamie melts into them and into Dani, leans her forehead forward carefully until she finds Dani’s, brings her hands up to cup her jaw.

“I promise. In the meantime, would you maybe want to go for a walk on the grounds with me tomorrow? If this lets up, I mean? It’ll be muddy as hell, no one else will be out, but we could…check on the roses, make sure the greenhouse isn’t damaged…?”

“See where that takes us,” Dani says, and Jamie can hear the smile in her voice.

“Exactly.”

“That sounds perfect. I’ll see you in the morning, then,” Dani says, and Jamie’s heart flutters and her stomach flips – how do such mundane words do this to her all of a sudden? Probably because they’re accompanied by one last stroke of Dani’s thumb across her cheekbone, one last press of Dani’s lips to hers, one last taste of Dani’s tongue.

Jamie returns to her own bed, and for about four minutes she’s certain she’s too buzzed to sleep, will never sleep again, before the adrenaline wears off and the drum of the rain and Dani’s sweet, slow breaths – which she can now imagine, no, _remember_ , ghosting over her own skin – lull her to sleep.

-

When Jamie startles awake some minutes or hours later, no clue in the timelessness of utter darkness, she assumes it’s thanks to another peal of thunder, yet her pricked ears don’t detect any lingering rumble. Rather, the rain on the windowpanes seems to have slowed, and above the patter, she hears…a murmur. Just one, so low and soft she thinks she’s imagined it, is about to drift back to sleep when – there it is again. This time followed by a few seconds of audibly heavy breathing from the other side of the room. Ah, Dani’s having a dream. Jamie, herself prone to nightmares that she prays don’t result in any sounds that her roommate can hear, again lets her eyes drift closed, sinks into her warm bed, safe in the storm, feels herself sliding into sleep –

“Mmmph, Jay.” Jamie’s suddenly ripped from anything resembling slumber by the first syllable of her own name, she’s nearly sure that’s what it was, uttered low and quiet, but not quiet enough. Nowhere near quiet enough when accompanied by what she can now identify over the white noise of the rain as a steady, rhythmic rustle of sheets. 

_Holy shit._ There will be other nights, sure, but apparently for Dani there’s also this one.

Jamie’s body goes into overdrive then, trying at once not to hear anything, _no no no no not meant for you_ , and trying to hear _everything_ Dani’s doing. The latter effort quickly wins out, and she feels her face, her arms, her chest flush, her abdomen clench, her thighs flex. Most importantly, her mouth falls open to soundlessly release the pent-up huff of surprise, of shock, of sheer _wow_.

So, apparently, she can’t not listen at this point, and she can’t turn over, doesn’t want to interrupt Dani, also doesn’t want her to know that she’s heard, _god_ , she’d die of embarrassment. As she’s weighing these options, she hears it again, only there’s no question at all this time what the word is: “Uh, Jamie,” is absolutely, without a doubt, what Dani’s mouth is saying between pants that are getting louder and more insistent.

It’s getting harder and harder to ignore the pressure building between her own thighs, getting harder and harder to flex her hands open and shut against the blanket rather than slide them underneath, tease below the waistband of her shorts. It would be so easy, perhaps she could do it, quietly, it would feel so… “Hmmm,” she hums, _fucking hums_ , involuntarily, just at the thought of getting some relief from what Dani’s putting her through. She hums, and the rustling from the other side of the room stops.

_Fuck._

“Jamie?” This time her name isn’t soft, isn’t secret – it’s squeaked out, shrill, and she surely has to answer if she wants to be able look herself in the eye in the morning, to look her friend in the eye ever again.

“Yeah?”

“Fuck! Fuck, I’m sorry, shit – ” Dani’s flailing verbally, and it sounds like physically as well, and Jamie pictures hands flying out of pajamas, up and out of covers, to land innocent on top of the blankets.

“N- no, it’s okay,” Jamie stammers back, her first goal to quell Dani’s panic. But she can’t yet bring herself to say the words _I want to, too_. She decides, or more accurately, is compelled, to show what she can’t tell: she releases the moan that’s the full form of the hum that had slipped out, sighs it into the room as her head tips back, feels it reverberate all the way down to her core.

Dani responds with a gasp – pause – _Ahh_ of her own that sounds, if Jamie had to put a label on it, relieved and hopeful, followed by a tiny, “Really?”

“Yeah really.” She nods vigorously, uselessly, into the inky blackness of the room, so badly does she want Dani to understand that she’s sure. And that small introductory admission and recognition gives Jamie the kick of courage she needs to leap from where she’s teetering on the knife’s edge between want and trepidation to add: “Can I, too?”

“Oh my god, yeah,” Dani breathes back.

Jamie, hands shaky as her breath but just as determined to persist, takes the granted permission. Heart thundering to rival the storm outside, she slides her palms down the front of her shirt, under her blanket, to the front of her pajamas, hovers them there, hot and hesitant, until she hears Dani do the same.

She doesn’t move any more than that until she hears Dani’s breath deepen again, hears a sigh that she can also somehow see in her mind: Dani’s lips slightly parted, her tongue resting against her bottom teeth, a smile curling the corners of her mouth. The image, the sound, the knowledge of what Dani’s likely doing, what Dani’s _definitely_ feeling, nudge her back into action, and she cups and presses through the flannel of her pajama bottoms. The relief is immediate and profound, but as soon as she registers it, the ache renews itself, stronger, deeper, lower, no doubt sped along by how Dani’s now panting, and how those pants are infused with the same hums and whimpers Dani made as her tongue teased into Jamie’s mouth just hours before.

She realizes that she can’t remember the last time she was able to let herself make noise – either the actual presence of a roommate or the knowledge that one could come bursting in anytime has been a constant for her for nearly two years, and she’s grown used to stifling herself when she (rarely) indulges.

For all the restraint she’s had to show, though, her body catches up masterfully. As she continues teasing and touching, she gives herself permission to match Dani’s volume, and finds that a long exhale that not only _can_ be heard but is _meant_ to be heard sends rippling waves of pleasure that shamefully stifled breaths just don’t.

It’s Dani’s first audible whine that leads Jamie – practically _makes_ Jamie – finally work her fingers under her waistband and down to touch herself properly. She immediately produces a matched one at the contact, tracing her fingers in slow, firm circles while smiling into the night. They enter into a dance of sound: whimpers take the place of fingertips, moans stand in for kisses, and every noise from one side of the room draws forth an echo from the other.

Jamie’s found a rhythm that matches what she can hear of Dani’s, is rocking harder with each passing minute into her hand in time with the rustling of sheets and blankets across the way. When Dani makes her way back to the thing that broke Jamie originally, but says it clear and bold this time –“ah, Jamie, Jamie, ah,” – something deep inside Jamie clenches at the wildly belated realization: _she’s imagining it’s me_.

She’s imagining those are my fingers touching–

My movements making her–

And it’s so much that Jamie has to still her own hand temporarily to keep from losing consciousness.

When she recovers a little, she allows herself the same: she _actively_ pictures Dani next to her in her bed, imagines that the finger pressing insistently into her is Dani’s, that it’s Dani’s arm disappearing into her covers and Dani’s breath coming hot and needy into her ear, that she can feel Dani’s hair across the pillowcase and smell Dani’s lip gloss and taste Dani’s kiss, again.

The whole thing is just so _much_ , it’s sensory overload, it’s a supernova, that she can’t help it, she does the exact same thing, whines out, “Dani, fuck,” which just makes it all feel that much better, so she says it again, and again, and again as she starts to lose the rhythm, lose anything but the drive toward a higher and higher swell of pure bliss that’s only buoyed by the repetitions of her own name coming from across the room.

It’s not long after that – though what is time when you’re sliding between degrees and types of newfound pleasure – when she registers another change in Dani’s breathing: faster and more desperate come her breaths, higher come the sounds, and again she pulls Jamie right along with her as though physically by her side. Jamie’s already seeing stars, already arching back into her pillow, already biting her lip against too much volume, when Dani’s strangled breaths give way to a muffled _Umph!_ followed by a long, slow exhale and a long, slow moan.

Jamie lets herself fall, limp, eyes shut and hands open on the sheets. She lays there for what feels like long minutes, figures that Dani is doing the same, reveling in the waves of release that follow the delicious tension, the need to talk erased, and thank fuck, because she may have lost the ability.

She’s nearly regained something resembling normal brainwaves, she thinks, when she hears Dani sit up, hears her feet hit the floor, hears rapid footsteps. 

Oh no. She’s gone, she’s leaving, she’s gonna tell someone, Jamie’s fucked up, Jamie’s screwed, Jamie’s lost her –

The panic brings Jamie upright, and she means to rise as well, to chase her, to call out _Don’t leave, we can forget all about it, honest!_ She’s just about to make her muscles, jelly though they are, do these things, make them _go_ , make them catch Dani, when Jamie herself is caught: by Dani’s hands firm on her shoulders, by Dani’s knees finding her bed on either side of her body, by Dani’s lips, back on her own where they already fit so seamlessly.

Dani, sure as she’s always been, was never leaving, was never running anywhere but where she’d wanted to be all night. Jamie nearly laughs aloud at herself for imagining otherwise, nearly cries with relief, but does neither because her mouth has better things to do right now. Namely, it has to meet Dani’s in a deep kiss, has to lick up Dani’s jawline, has to nip at Dani’s shoulder where her sleep shirt falls away.

Breaths still heavy from a thing shared but only just, Jamie pulls Dani down onto her bed, eager to immerse in the full experience of her, incredulous that she thought she could deny or delay it. That they land together in a tangle matters not at all, because any part of Dani that’s close enough to Jamie’s hands is the next part that she needs to touch; any part that’s within reach of her mouth is the next part to be traced and licked and kissed and known in this new and wondrous way.

They kiss until Jamie’s lips are swollen and numb, whisper until Jamie’s eyelids are heavy, touch until the sweat on Jamie’s skin has dried and cooled and been rewarmed again by touches and licks and tickles of breath. When the sky outside starts to lighten, Dani nuzzles her face into Jamie’s neck, sighs contentedly, and Jamie knows it’s finally time to sleep, prays that the storm means that the morning routine will be cancelled or at least delayed.

She’s wrapping her arms more securely around Dani, anchoring her at her side, even before the ask comes: “Can I stay?”

“Want you to.” And she finds that she means it as much as she’s ever meant anything.

-

Everything and nothing changes after that night.

Everything is different now that Jamie knows what it’s like to cradle Dani’s perfect face in her hands, taste her lips, trace her collarbones and ribs with her fingertips. Everything is different now that she lets herself see Dani for the treasure that she is, lets herself understand that falling can feel like flying, can be worth the crushing ache she finally admits she’s been working around, studiously ignoring, pounding into the garden soil for weeks.

Everything is different – everything is magic, everything is gleaming – now that she finally understands that Dani _notices_ her, notices her for all the reasons she never realized she wanted to be, that Dani fits into her life, small and boring and plain as it is, that Dani fits there and completes it and preserves it and yet elevates it somehow too.

Nothing is different, too. Jamie still watches daily as her peers flutter and flail around Dani. _Fucking moths to a flame._ She watches, from afar, always from afar, smiling inwardly as Dani, in her way, bats them away firmly, but not hard enough to hurt feelings. Watches Dani’s effect sweep over teachers, students, boys, girls – every occupant of a room follows Dani’s sweet face, her bright sparkly eyes, and _good god_ that hair, when she walks in.

Watches and passes the time, until sooner or later, but most usually sooner, Dani detaches herself from all those would-be worshippers and makes her way, no rush at all, but graceful and sure as the tides, back to Jamie.


	7. dorothea

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For track #8 - dorothea
> 
> I give you... movie star Dani Clayton.
> 
> Enjoy. 🖤

Danielle Clayton is a wonder of a woman. A truly beautiful, sweet, kind and sensitive human being. She’s a star of Hollywood – America’s sweetheart, some say. But to Jamie Taylor, she is _everything_. An entire ocean between them hasn’t changed that fact.

Jamie hasn’t seen her in eight years. Hasn’t spoken to her in five. But Danielle’s face graces every screen and billboard she sees. So, when the invitation to their college alumni celebration with: **Elmhurst Sixth Form College welcomes back our very own Danielle Clayton** plastered across the page came through the post, two thoughts crossed Jamie’s mind. 

  1. ‘ _I would rather spoon my own eyes out than see old college kids again.’_



And.

  1. _‘Fuckfuckfuck, what do I say to the one that got away?’_



Ultimately, there really is no question. She's going.

Jamie met Danielle when she was _just Dani_. A shy, nervous sixteen year old, moved to London by her mother for a reasonable sixth form college and a side of prestigious acting classes.

Love at first sight really was just a steaming old pile of bullshit to Jamie – until she saw Dani, sitting under an old Weeping Willow tree with her head stuck in a book and a soft smile on her lips.

And that’s how it stayed. For weeks. Until one day she decided to bite the bullet and say hello. And by hello, she actually said: “ _Good morning_.” At two o’clock in the afternoon. Inside she screamed at herself, but Dani only looked up with that glorious smile and said: “ _Hi._ ”

That was the start of a beautiful friendship. They would sit under the Willow tree together every day. They would talk and study and laugh and Jamie fell deeper and deeper in love.

When Jamie got her drivers licence at seventeen and bought a battered old truck, she would pick Dani up every night. She would wait down the road as Dani snuck out of her bedroom window and greet her in the front seat with a kiss on the cheek and a travel mug of tea.

It was them against the world. And even though she wished and hoped that Dani would love her back in the same way, she never once made her true feelings known, only that Dani was her best friend. Her _person._ And having Dani in her life as just a friend was enough for her.

In the end, it was Dani who initiated it. It was Dani who – after an argument with her mother about going back to America – called Jamie to pick her up and take her somewhere, anywhere. It was Dani who admitted she didn’t want to leave because she didn’t want to leave Jamie.

_“We'll still talk. I’ll come visit. We can still be friends.”_ Jamie told her, holding Dani's head against her chest.

_“I don’t want to be your friend.”_ Dani answered, pulling on Jamie’s jacket with both hands.

_“What?”_

_“I mean...”_ Dani looked up at her with tears glistening in her eyes, _“I don’t want to **just** be your... friend.” _

It was there, under the Willow tree, that Dani kissed Jamie for the first time.

The months that followed were magnificent and emotional in equal measure. Dani still snuck out to Jamie’s truck every night, only now they greeted each other with hot and hungry kisses. Jamie spent less time driving and more time parked up, sat in the backseat with Dani.

They couldn’t be public. They couldn’t be anything more than best friends in front of their families. Dani's mother was a dragon and her daughter had to conform to her idea of a perfect lady. A straight (literally) A student and the star of her acting class. Dani was of course both of those things, but most definitely _not_ _straight_.

When she turned eighteen and graduated from college, Jamie signed a lease on a little flat above a pub. The money she stashed away from years of working a gardening job really paid off. When she left college it became full time and she was finally able to move out and start her life.

It opened a brand new door in her relationship with Dani. A private space for them to truly be themselves. Together. For months they had wanted and _wanted_ , but Jamie refused to let their first time be in the back of her truck or in Dani's bedroom with her mother downstairs.

It was natural to them. It was intense and magical and all the things the first time with someone you love should be. But it was all hindered by reality.

The reality that Dani had to leave. That her mother was taking her back to America. That she would most likely go on to become a successful actress and Jamie would be stuck here in the tiny town of Bly, thousands of miles away.

“ _Stay here with me, move in with me._ ” Jamie said one night, curled up under the duvet with Dani.

“ _I can’t. You know I want to, Jamie, but I can’t._ ”

It broke Jamie’s heart clean in two the day Dani left. When it all came down to it, she understood why she had to go, but part of her hated that Dani chose her _mothers_ dream over a life with her.

They agreed to stay friends, but that a relationship wouldn’t work. They agreed to talk every day and make an effort. And it was nice... for a time.

The move back to America was the birth of _Danielle Clayton._ She starred in a superhero movie franchise, rocked a latex body suit and stole the hearts of millions of people around the world.

She was the lead in a re-imagining of Cinderella, but when the news broke that Dani and her co-star – Prince-fucking-Charming – were involved in an intimate relationship, Jamie made the grievous decision to cut contact and stop following her career entirely. It was gut-wrenching, but entirely necessary.

That was five years ago.

*

“ _Whyyyyy_ do I have to go?” Jamie whines and throws herself back onto Owen's couch.

“Come on, _Danielle Clayton_ will be there. Not many people can say that they _know_ Danielle Clayton.” Owen says, wagging a beer in front of her face.

Jamie sighs, sits up and takes the beer. “But I don’t _know_ Danielle Clayton.” She shakes her head, “I knew _Dani_. Before all the fame and the billboards and the awards and shite."

“You still never told me what happened between you two...?”

“Nothin' to tell. We were mates, that’s all.” Jamie says, staring straight ahead at the wall and her beer. It's a lie. There’s a _lot_ to tell. But she won’t, she would never.

Owen scoffs, “Yeah, right. Well anyway, will you get me an autograph?” Owen says, walking back from his bookshelf with a copy of a ‘ _This Week In Hollywood’_ magazine.

Jamie rolls her eyes and takes the book. Dani; in a red shirt, biting the tip of a sheer red glove off her hand. She looks incredibly sexy. _Beautiful_ as always. Jamie clears her throat and hands the magazine back to Owen. “No.”

-

It's Thursday and the town is buzzing with talk of Dani arriving later. Apparently she’s staying at the only hotel in Bly, which just so happens to be the building over the road from Jamie’s flat. Jamie hasn’t decided if she will even _speak_ to Dani yet, so having her in a hotel room across the damn road is doing her heart rate absolutely no good.

The crowds are gathering already. Jamie makes herself scarce; she doesn’t want to be around to see Dani get out of her car. The longer she can put off seeing her, the better.

So, she drives. And for some reason, she drives to the same places her and Dani used to go to; under the bridge, up the hills, through the country lanes near the posh Manor and somehow she finds herself outside their old college staring up at the Willow tree.

She used to come here a lot when Dani first left just to try to feel close to her. It is the first place they met and the first place they kissed after all. So, to find herself here now, looking up at the hanging branches, she can’t help but wonder what it would be like to be here with Dani again.

There’s still a marking in the bark on the tree trunk, faded from years of growth, but it’s there. Jamie runs her fingers across the etched ‘ ** _D & J_**' and smiles to herself. She remembers Dani scratching it on there one night with Jamie's pocketknife before kissing her silly against the wood.

She sits at the roots and rests her head back against the tree. She remembers exactly how it feels to have Dani sit beside her, to press their arms together and just _exist._ And if she closes her eyes and thinks hard enough, she can physically _feel_ Dani's presence.

“Hi.”

Jamie jumps and turns her head at breakneck speed to her right. She isn’t imagining it. Dani actually is sitting beside her, under _their_ tree, looking at her with those enchanting blue eyes and a small smile.

“Dani.” Every bit of air has been stripped from her lungs. Every bit of colour has likely drained from her face, too.

“Figured you’d be here. I um, I tried your flat but you weren’t there. Thought I’d chance my arm and come here.”

Dani is wearing a baggy black hoodie, her hair pushed back under the hood. She's obviously trying to be incognito, but Jamie would recognise those eyes even in the busiest of crowds.

“I... I don’t come here, usually. But.” Jamie shrugs, swallows the lump in her throat and turns her body a little to face Dani. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m here for the reunion thing.”

Jamie raises an eyebrow and tilts her head. “ _Here,_ Dani. Now.”

Dani just looks at her with sad eyes. She opens her mouth to speak, but nothing comes out. Jamie nods slowly.

“So, the reunion.” Jamie says, looking back towards the college building.

“Not just the reunion.” Dani blurts out loud and unexpectedly. Jamie turns back to look at her. “I... I missed you.”

If this were five years ago, Jamie would take the shot and lean forward into a kiss. But it isn’t, and Dani has... well, she isn’t sure what Dani has because she knows nothing about her anymore.

“Say something.” Dani lowers her hood and ruffles her hair, it falls down beside her face, framing just like a golden border around a grand painting.

Jamie would talk if she weren’t so mesmerised. If she weren’t so deeply fucking happy to have Dani sitting in front of her again in this spot under this tree. It doesn’t matter that she’s famous or that almost everyone knows who she is, to Jamie she is just Dani. Perfect, amazing Dani who she loved then and still loves now.

“I... Dani, I--”

“It's okay if you didn’t miss me too.” Dani cuts her off, looking down at the grass.

“Of course I fuckin' missed you,” Jamie says, cupping Dani's chin with one hand and lifting so she looks up. “Every day. Never stopped missing ya.”

Dani smiles a sweet, tight lipped smile. “I'm sorry I left.”

“Don’t be. Seems like you’ve done pretty well for yourself. Bagged yourself an Oscar yet?” Jamie smirks and nudges Dani's leg with her fist.

“Missed out. Twice.” Dani shrugs.

Jamie suspects she isn’t all that bothered about not winning. Dani has a talent for acting but has never done anything just for the gold. That is more than can be said for her mother, who is most likely cashing in on being her manager.

“Shame. And what about the um... boyfriend?” Jamie asks quietly. She knows the truth about Dani, not only did seeing her with another person hit Jamie like a freight train, but the fact it was a man really rubbed salt in the wound.

Dani frowns. “You... don’t know?”

Jamie shakes her head.

“We broke up about three months ago.”

Jamie’s heart skips at the news. Not only is Dani back in town, but Dani is _single_ and back in town.

“Oh. No, I didn’t know. Sorry to hear that.” Jamie says in a low and sympathetic voice.

“I’m surprised you didn’t know. It was pretty messy, the media went nuts. Someone leaked messages and sold stories to the papers.”

“Ah shit. Sorry.” Jamie looks down for a second, time to be honest, she thinks. “I kinda stopped following you years ago.”

Dani's eyebrows raise, her face surprised. And then her expression changes and she looks hurt. Jamie panics.

“I mean, I was happy for you and everything. I wished you nothing but the best and still do. But I couldn’t watch you with him on and off screen. Was too hard.”

Dani doesn’t respond. She only stares, blinking, tears threatening to emerge. She hesitates, then finally opens her mouth and Jamie’s heart starts beating again.

“I- I’m so ashamed of myself.” Dani shakes her head in disgust and looks down at the ground. “Every day I’m just living this lie because I’m too afraid to be myself. I mean, could you imagine my mom if I came out?”

“Yeah, Karen would have a fit for sure.”

“And then there’s work. I know it’s more accepted now but I’ve been sold as some kind of girl next door and it would ruin my career. I thought if I tried to fit in, to try to be what was expected of me, that eventually I would feel how I was supposed to.”

Jamie’s heart aches, she reaches her hand out and takes hold of one of Dani's. “It's okay.”

“You’re the only person on the planet who knows, you know.”

“I’m here for you, Dani. I know you’ve got your people over there and you’ve probably got an amazing life... But I’m here if you ever need some room to breathe.” The words just fall out of Jamie’s mouth. It’s not that she doesn’t mean them, she does, she doesn’t exactly know what Dani needs anymore.

It turns out that those words are exactly what Dani needs. Jamie can see the weight lift off Dani – it’s in her relaxed shoulders and easy smile – a wide smile that sends a lightning bolt of electricity straight to Jamie’s heart, shocking it into overdrive.

“Celebrity friends are really fucking high maintenance. My life is exhausting. And I don’t want to complain about it because I know how lucky I am, but holy shit I was happy to finally get out of town and come... Home.”

Home. Where Dani only spent three years of her life. Jamie tries not to focus on how that word makes her feel. So she just smiles, lifts Dani's hand to her mouth and kisses her knuckles gently.

“Wanna hit a drive through McDonald’s like the old days?” Jamie grins.

“Oh my god, yes please.” Dani squeaks a little and stands to her feet. Jamie follows along and they walk together side by side to her truck.

“You got a new one.” Dani says as she jumps into the passenger seat.

“Yeah, needed an upgrade.” Jamie starts the engine and drives down the road. The radio plays quietly in the background and Dani stares out of the window with a smile plastered on her face.

There’s a few moments of comfortable silence before Dani clears her throat. “So, how have you been?”

“Good. Got my own flower shop now. It’s doing well and I get to do what I love every day.”

“That’s amazing. I’m happy for you. And what about um...” Dani pauses, chuckles nervously, “are you seeing anyone?”

Jamie knows Dani is looking at her, so she shakes her head in response. “Nah. Not got time for anything serious.”

With a quick glance over, she can see the smile on Dani's face as she looks out of the window. Suddenly she feels seventeen again, driving Dani around town in the dead of night in their own little world.

“Better put your hood up, hide or something.” Jamie says as they pull into the drive through at a twenty-four hour McDonald’s.

“Not this time. Not here.” Something about the way she says it feels personal to Jamie again. Like Dani isn’t hiding who she is with her.

She stops at the voice machine, orders two chicken nugget meals, a hot chocolate for Dani and a diet coke for herself.

“You remembered.” Dani says, voice trembling.

“Course. You always get a hot chocolate... And then steal my coke.” Jamie laughs and pulls around to the collection window.

The young man behind the glass opens the window and hands the bag of food over to Jamie, who in turn passes it to Dani. When Jamie looks back, the man is staring right past her to Dani, his mouth hanging open. Jamie clears her throat to re catch his attention.

“Sorry, sorry... Are you um... Are you Danielle Clayton ?” He passes Jamie the drinks without looking at her.

Dani just smiles, nods, “Yeah, hi.”

“Oh my god,” The man grins, squints his eyes at her, “oh my god it is, shit... wow... I love you, you’re incredible.”

Dani laughs. It’s a cute but it’s a fake _all-for-the-fans_ kind of laugh. “Thank you... Tom.”

It takes the man a second to realise she read his name from the name tag on his shirt and he smiles and laughs nervously. Jamie holds out her card to make the payment but the young man waves her off.

“No, please, let me get this if that’s alright?” He asks.

Dani nods, “Well alright, but can I have the receipt and a pen please?”

He scurries around, prints the receipt and hands it and a pen over to Jamie. Dani takes them, leans on the dash and writes: _Tom, thanks for dinner, lots of love, Danielle Clayton xo'_

That she has made Tom _happy_ is an understatement – Dani has just made this man’s entire _year._ She thanks him again and they drive off.

“That was nice.” Jamie says when they are driving again.

“Yeah, they’re not always like that. Especially the paparazzi – those people are a different breed all together. When me and Eddie broke up, they literally set up camp outside my house.”

“Jesus. Why did you break up?”

“Oh. He uh, he cheated on me.”

Jamie, wheels protesting noisily, immediately pulls into a clearing that looks out onto a stretch of land; just a landscape of grass for miles and the moon high in the sky.

“He did what? Shit, Dani, I’m so sorry.” She’s looking at Dani now with a sympathetic head tilt.

“It's alright. I’m over it. Kind of a blessing in disguise, really.” Dani's eyes twinkle and a glance down to Jamie’s lips.

The air around them is charged and, if she’s honest with herself, Jamie hasn’t wanted anything as much as she wants to kiss Dani right now. But she thinks back to eight years ago and the intense misery she felt when Dani left – and still feels. She looks away, grips the steering wheel with both hands and takes a deep breath.

“Food’s gettin’ cold, better tuck in.” She says quietly to hide the pain in her voice.

Dani stays still for a moment and then opens the bag. They eat quietly at first, until Dani turns the radio up suddenly, and her smile lights up the world. “Oh my god! Our song.” She says happily, turning in the seat to face Jamie. 

It’s Teenage Dream by Katy Perry and it was their own personal little message to each other, massively over played on the radio in 2011, but it was _theirs_.

Dani looks relaxed and happy, completely at peace and Jamie wonders how long it’s been since she’s felt this way. As she watches Dani enjoy the music, it's like she can _see_ her remembering the years they spent together, and she can’t stop words forming in her mouth. “Do you ever--"

Jamie turns the music down a little bit and discards the empty cardboard from their food onto the back seat, then looks down at the drink she’s holding in her hand. “Do you ever think about me? About... about us?”

It’s a question she’s wanted to ask for years, but she never thought she’d get the chance to hear the answer.

Dani makes a noise in her throat that can only be described as a whimper and before Jamie can look up, Dani is pulling the drink out of her hand and placing it in the cup holder. “Jamie.”

Just the way Dani says her name makes her heart stop. She shakes her head and is about to tell Dani to forget she asked, no longer sure she wants to know the answer. But Dani's hand is on the side of her face now – warm and familiar and she wants to feel it there forever.

“All the time. Every day. You were responsible for the best three years of my life.”

Jamie leans into Dani's hand, turns her face a little to kiss her palm once, and then again. Dani slides her hand into Jamie’s hair, just the way she used to right before she kissed her. Jamie folds, her heart takes over and she gives in to Dani's touch. They don’t kiss, they just rest their foreheads together for what feels like the longest second.

“Christ, Dani... I’ve missed you.” Tears sting Jamie's eyes as she speaks. She closes her eyes on them and rests her hand on the side of Dani's neck.

“Can I... kiss you?” Dani whispers against her lips.

“ _God,_ yes.”

It’s soft and slow at first, tender and so very intimate. Dani closes her fist gently around Jamie’s hair, pulling her deeper into to the kiss. Eight long years of feelings and missed opportunities fall around them like raindrops, or confetti.

Jamie can taste hot chocolate on Dani's lips and tongue, she can feel her hand tightening in her hair and her body trying desperately to inch closer. They’re in her truck, but Jamie doesn’t care, she has to feel Dani's body against hers as soon as possible.

She pulls away from the kiss, leans down and pulls the lever under the seat so she can push it back as far as possible. Without having to ask, Dani climbs over the gearstick and into Jamie’s lap, her lips hot on her mouth again within seconds.

Their hands are everywhere; Jamie with hers in Dani's hair and Dani pulling off Jamie’s blue flannel shirt. It's fast and spirited and everything Jamie has dreamt about. The thrill that Dani’s hands on her skin brings is wondrous, it makes every nerve in her body feel exposed and it is glorious.

“Mm... kissing you is so much better than I remember.” Dani says whilst trying to catch her breath.

Jamie nods. All she knows is that this feels right, with Dani peppering small kisses down her jawline and onto her neck. Her heart is thumping in her chest so hard she thinks it might actually jump out. This feels right, but she is also mindful that Dani is also _Danielle Clayton_ and they can’t be together. She puts the thought to the back of her mind and takes Dani's face in both of her hands, lifts so that she’s looking directly into her eyes.

“You’re even more beautiful than I remember. I didn’t think that would be possible.” Jamie murmurs.

Before Dani can respond, a bright set of headlights shine from behind them. It's Jamie who jumps first, panics, worries that whoever it is might see them and recognise Dani – that would be headline news back in Hollywood for sure.

Dani jumps back into the passenger seat, laughing as she goes. Jamie joins in, because as it always has been, Dani's laugh is perfect and infectious. She pulls her seat forward and starts the engine. The car that was behind them is now beside them and it surprises Jamie that Dani doesn’t try to hide.

They drive back into town. Jamie goes the long way round, eager to spend as much time as possible with Dani. Jamie explains how the town really hasn’t changed much, she listens as Dani talks about LA and the ever-changing scenes. It sounds exhausting and not at all like Dani.

When they finally pull up outside the hotel, Dani turns to Jamie and takes her hand. “Will I see you tomorrow?”

“Course. I’ll be there.” Jamie smiles.

Despite the fervour of their kissing, they call it a night. It hasn’t been spoken out loud, but they both know that tonight isn’t the night to fall into bed together, regardless of how much they want to.

“Goodnight, Jamie.” Dani squeezes Jamie’s hand and then gets out of the truck. Jamie waits until she’s inside before she gets out herself and walks across the road to her flat.

-

The entire day has been a blur. From getting up, working, getting college alumni party ready, to this moment – having Dani pressed against a closed door in a dark classroom. It's been building for hours, the glancing looks across the decorated hall, the simple small talk they’ve had to endure with old classmates and teachers.

Not to mention the way Dani _looks_ tonight. She really came out looking red carpet ready; she has her blonde hair styled in old-school Hollywood curls, pinned back in a chignon bun. Her dress has a white skirt that flows down to the ground and an intricately patterned gold top – off the shoulder sleeves, low cut and almost sheer in some places. She’s truly breath-taking.

“They’ll be looking for you, yanno.” Jamie mutters against Dani’s lips, running her hands up Dani's sides, pushing her gently back against the door.

“Don’t care. I need to... Need to feel you.” Dani pulls hard on the dark red braces that sit over Jamie’s shoulders and kisses her like the world might end right this second. Her hands are everywhere, pulling the white shirt Jamie is wearing out of her black pants just to snake her hands up under and feel skin.

There are people walking along the corridor. They must be Dani's security because Jamie can hear American accents, the crackling of walkie-talkies and the open-shut of doors to the surrounding rooms. Not too surprising, Dani told them she was only going to the bathroom.

“Jamie.” Dani breathes out, her hands shaking against Jamie’s waist. “I... I can’t do this anymore.”

Jamie panics, steps back. “I’m sorry, I- I thought you wanted to... I’m sorry.”

“No, I mean...” Dani reaches out, pulls Jamie back in against her, “I want you. I don’t want to go back to LA. It isn’t me, I’m just... not _me_ the way I am when I’m with you.”

Jamie wants to drop to her knees and beg Dani not to go back. To tell her they can be together like they were always supposed to be. Instead, she gulps and puts one hand on the side of Dani's face and whispers, “It's never too late to come back to my side.”

Dani closes her eyes on a tear and Jamie can see the torment, the pain, the unhappiness that being Danielle Clayton brings her. She wants to kiss it away, to turn it into love and want and acceptance.

Dani opens her eyes and looks at Jamie for a long second, “I’d like that.”

-


End file.
